The main manifest file is ops/base.yml. This file is shared across the deployments. Edits to this file will apply to all deployments. Use overrides in deployment env files for deployment specific changes (ex. env.yml).
The top section of the ops/base.yml file, meta, hold the parameters that are loaded into properties in the instance_groups section below using spruce (( grab ... )) functions. Entries labelled with (( param ... )) are expected as parameters within the env files.
You can specify any secrets via the kit-overrides.yml file, in the same format as used by regular Genesis kits. See Genesis docs/AUTHORING-KITS.md for instructions regarding specifying credentials and certificates, or any of the other Genesis kits found under the genesis-community organization on Github. If your deployment uses credhub instead, you can specify secret-store: credhub as a top-level key/value in the kit-overrides.yml file instead. You can also write per-env kit overrides in kit.overrides section in the environment.
Finally, if you want to add functionality via scripts that operate on specific environments, you can add these script to the addons/ directory in your repository. The scripts have to be executable on whatever platform they will be run on, so it is recommended that you use bash or perl as they are already known to be required and available for Genesis. The script has to support the following arguments: help that prints out the usage information, and run that performs the desired action.
You will use genesis init -k generic <name> to create a new <name>-deployments> directory for your deployments repository. It will also set the deployment type to <name> so that your deployments will be named <env>-<name> instead of <env>-generic. Once initialized, copy the base manifest into ops/base.yml, then run genesis new <env> to create your first environment file.