Components are slices of configuration files.
The configuration files that Confab manages are controlled by which components are selected.
confab (in all lowercase) is an included command line script.
For details see Via confab – The Default Console Script.
Environments are groups of hosts that work together for a single purpose.
It’s common to have one environment for development, one for staging, one for production and so forth.
Hosts are physical or virtual machines accessible via ssh.
Confab will normally identify hosts by their fully qualified domain name (FQDN), so hostnames matter.
Roles are groups of zero or more components that achieve a common purpose.
In the degenerate case where a role has no components, the role itself is taken to be a component.