Sentinel Language

Sentinel policies are written using the Sentinel language. This language is easy to learn and easy to write. You can learn the Sentinel language and be productive within an hour. Learning Sentinel doesn't require any formal programming experience.

This language guide will contain many details that are not necessary to be productive with Sentinel or are targeted to those who are looking for exact information about the language (such as what types of line endings are allowed). You can safely ignore these sentences.

You may also view the official language specification This is a specific and detailed document on the syntax and behavior of the language primarily intended for implementation creators and to disambiguate the language.

Simplest Example

The example below is about the simplest practical example of Sentinel. It is reasonable to imagine this as a realistic policy. This shows that in most cases, Sentinel will be extremely simple:

main = rule { request.method is "GET" and request.headers contains "X-Key" }

Files

Sentinel policies are single files that end in the .sentinel file extension. There is currently no built-in mechanism to Sentinel for merging multiple files. This is purposefully done to make Sentinel policies easy to submit to systems that support Sentinel policies.

Sentinel policy files must be UTF-8 encoded and can end in both Unix (LF) or Windows (CRLF) line breaks. When running the auto-formatter, line endings will always use Unix line breaks.

Ordering

Sentinel policies are executed top-down. For example:

a = 1      // a = 1 here
b = a + 1  // b = 2 here
a = 3      // a = 3, b = 2

In this example, the value of a and b is shown at each line. Since Sentinel executes values top-down, the final value of a is 3 and b is 2. b does not become 4.

Main

Sentinel expects there to be a main rule. The value of this rule is the result of the entire policy.

The result of the policy depends on the evaluated contents of the main rule. For booleans, a policy passes on a true value, and fails on a false value. Other types generally follow a zero or zero-length pattern for determining success.

A value of main that falls outside of the above types will result in a policy error. As a special case, if main evaluates to an undefined value, the error message will indicate as such, with a reference to where the undefined value was encountered.

More Complex Example

The simple example above is a full working example. In our experience with Sentinel, many policies can be representing using this simple form. However, to show more features of the language, a more complex example is shown below. This example is also a realistic example of what Sentinel may be used for.

import "units"

memory = func(job) {
  result = 0
  for job.groups as g {
    for g.tasks as t {
      result += t.resources.memory else 0
    }
  }

  return result
}

main = rule {
  memory(job) < 1 * units.gigabyte
}