YAML support

[mihai-stancu]

Hello,

I saw a tentative successor app that was eventually abandoned back in 2021 ecfg. Are there any (further) plans or alternatives for YAML support?

Currently a few design choices are making working with a wrapper script much harder:

• not taking input via stdin
• encrypt not writing output to stdout
• overall not easy to write a series of pipes as yq -ojson . my.eyaml | ejson encrypt | yq -oyaml . | sponge my.eyaml

So "on the fly conversion" from an eyaml file to ejson to be used with this tool requires a temporary file + writing back into the original file (when encrypting).

Thank you, Mihai

[mihai-stancu]

Example wrapper script for YAML:

#!/bin/bash -e

declare -A map;
args=("$@")
for i in "${!args[@]}"; do
  arg="${args[i]}";

  # Guard clause: Skip if not an eYAML file
  [[ ! -f "$arg" ]] && [[ ! $arg =~ *.eyml ]] && [[ ! $arg =~ *.eyml ]] && continue;

  # Temporarily convert eYAML to eJSON
  tmp=$(mktemp eyaml_XXXXXX.ejson);
  trap 'rm -f "$tmp"' EXIT;
  yq -ojson . "$arg" > "$tmp";

  # Replace eYAML file with eJSON file
  args[i]="$tmp";
  map["$arg"]="$tmp";
done

case "$*" in
  # Convert eJSON files back to eYAML
  *"encrypt "*|*" encrypt"*|*" encrypt "*)
    ejson "${args[@]}";
    STATUS="$?";

    for original in "${!map[@]}"; do
        yq -P "${map[$original]}" > "$original";
    done

    exit $STATUS;
  ;;

  # Convert JSON output to YAML
  *"decrypt "*|*" decrypt"*|*" decrypt "*)
    ejson "${args[@]}" | yq -P .;
 ;;

  *)
    ejson "${args[@]}";
  ;;
esac

[thepwagner]

👋 there's nothing planned, but if these features are guarded by new flags/arguments PRs are welcome!

https://github.com/getsops/sops/ supports YAML+JSON among other formats, might be worth checking out.

[mihai-stancu]

Thank you for the prompt reply & the sops suggestion.

sops doesn't appear to allow team members to add new values, it has a checksum over the entire file and assumes the file will be decrypted when editing (with their handy sops edit somefile.yml).

I'll take a look at the ejson main package to see how hard adding yaml support would be.

Thank you!

[mihai-stancu]

From the architecture of the package I notice that there's a JSON walker implementation meant to take entries in the order they are found (to avoid randomizing the order of the output).

With that in mind an eyaml implementation would either

• require a YAML walker implementation that fits the same interface, or
• load the YAML file into memory, parse it & convert it to JSON, hand it over to the JSON walker implementation

The walker approach seems to dig fairly "deep" into the implementation. But the in-memory YAML & conversion seems wasteful.

Do you have a go/no-go for either of these?