YAML/JSON file toolkit
Soya is a program designed to work with YAML and JSON files in a flexible manner that I hope will be useful for configuration management.
soya - YAML/JSON toolkit
Copyright (c) 2018 Edmund Lam
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
This application includes software licensed under the MIT License (see
doc/MIT-LICENSE) and Copyright (c) 2015 REA-Group.
- Ruby 1.9.3 (or higher). See: https://www.ruby-lang.org
- Rubygem safe_yaml 1.0.4 (or higher). See: https://github.com/dtao/safe_yaml
$ gem install safe_yaml
$ gem install soya
$ soya -h
I initially wanted to write a program that converted between YAML and JSON. That was due to my desire to use YAML as my AWS-CloudFormation template language (due to YAML's support of comments and before AWS added YAML support), but I still wanted to be able to easily use JSON templates from online search results.
Over time, the problem space expanded. I should possibly split this into multiple programs, that's the Unix-way after all. But managing half-a-dozen scripts seems like it'd be a pain. And the various functionality seems to complement each other pretty well.
The background of the copying functionality was my desire to take advantage of anchors/references within the YAML specification. But given the lack of JSON support, I made it a copy action instead. This is a pattern in this program. While it supports both JSON and YAML, it fundamentally caters to the lowest-common-denominator (which is JSON) when deciding what's valid/invalid (eg data-types). It's undoubtedly a sign that I should have one program that translates between JSON/YAML and a different one which does everything else (with YAML only). But this current program solves my problem pretty well right now, though I accept chocolate bribes.
YAML is a complex specification. And I'm pretty sure that there are bugs in more obscure uses of this program. That said, I suspect I've covered 99% of the common use cases. And in the spirit of "Worse-is-Better" (see: https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html), I think I can leave those corner cases unresolved for now.