Runbook

A reproducible, step-by-step operational procedure. A human with basic system access should be able to execute it without prior knowledge of the context.

Typical examples: rotating a private key, revoking a compromised PAT, recovering a failed release, rolling back a deploy.

When to write one

• After resolving an incident that could happen again
• When automating something and the manual override needs documenting
• When a process lives in only one person's head and needs to exist outside of it

What a runbook is NOT

• A technical decision — that's an ADR
• A getting-started tutorial — that belongs in the corresponding product docs
• A post-mortem — that's a different document type (possible future section)

On this site

They live in /docs/operations/runbooks/.