[!CAUTION] April 21st 2024 - Because of the treatment VyOS maintainers/owners have shown the community in the past few weeks/months this project is abandoned, I do not want to support them in any way.

vyaml

A commandline toolkit for configuring VyOS devices in YAML.
The YAML configuration can be enhanced with custom tags, and applied directly.

Commands

vyaml apply applies a configuration in the following fashion:

• loads default configuration
• applies the configuration from YAML, decrypting any secrets in runtime
• displays the difference (equivalent to show | compare)
• commits and saves
• if there were containers configured it will also:
  • pull new images
  • restart containers with updated images

vyaml render will convert the configuration to set commands and output then to the screen without running them.

vyaml encrypt will read input on stdin and encrypt it so it can be added as a secret to the configuration.

vyaml import will convert the running config to YAML and output it to stdout.

Tags

Additional YAML tags supported:

• !env will replace the value with an environment variable

  user: !env USER

  is equivalent to:

  user: vyos

• !secret will replace the value with an encrypted secret

  plaintext-password: !secret |
    656a34220330e6659cc40b0a0dafcb9cf04efcda530c170722da9b8a318c7584
    a9811da7eda054a845c8f2e1410a0dcf034f6ad37207e0da1a819d31d6ef650a
    0da3cf0186e35f688db1548038695c5e6f

  is equivalent to:

  plaintext-password: supersecret

• !include lets you include other YAML files, useful for segmenting large configuration files

  # can be either absolute path or relative to this file
  system: !include /path/to/system.yaml
  services: !include services.yaml

  is equivalent to:

  system:
    host-name: vyos
  services:
    ssh:
      port: 22

Secrets

Secrets generated with vyaml encrypt are encrypted with AES-256-GCM, with a key derivated with scrypt for added entropy, and should be safe to commit to Git.

To use secrets in a configuration, or to encrypt data, a key file must be supplied using the -k/--key argument. Following best practices, the key should be of sufficient length.

Anchors

If you want to use YAML anchors and aliases but not render the anchor "template" block, prefix it with a ., e.g:

.container-base: &container
  memory: '0'
container:
  name:
    nginx:
      <<: *container
      image: nginx:latest

will become:

set container name nginx memory '0'
set container name nginx image 'nginx:latest'

Examples

system:
  host-name: vyos
  name-server:
    - 1.1.1.1
    - 1.0.0.1

  login:
    user:
      vyos:
        authentication:
          plaintext-password: !secret |
            656a34220330e6659cc40b0a0dafcb9cf04efcda530c170722da9b8a318c7584
            a9811da7eda054a845c8f2e1410a0dcf034f6ad37207e0da1a819d31d6ef650a
            0da3cf0186e35f688db1548038695c5e6f

interface:
  ethernet:
    eth0:
      address: dhcp

service:
  ssh:
    port: 22

container:
  network:
    nginx:
      prefix: 172.20.0.0/16

  name:
    nginx:
      image: nginx:latest
      network: nginx
      port:
        http:
          source: 80
          destination: 80

The above configuration becomes:

set system host-name vyos
set system name-server 1.1.1.1
set system name-server 1.0.0.1
set system login user vyos authentication plaintext-password supersecret
set interface ethernet eth0 address dhcp
set service ssh port 22
set container network nginx prefix 172.20.0.0/16
set container name nginx image nginx:latest
set container name nginx network nginx
set container name nginx port http source 80
set container name nginx port http destination 80

You can also shorten down some of the nesting:

container:
  name:
    nginx:
      port:
        http:
          source: 80
          destination: 80

is equivalent to:

container name:
  nginx:
    port http source: 80
    port http destination: 80

or even this, although then it's practically like running commands directly:

container name nginx port http source: 80
container name nginx port http destination: 80

Installation

Releases are available here on GitHub, packaged as a standalone executable and a DEB package, for both amd64 and arm64 architectures.

https://github.com/p3lim/vyaml/releases

To install (or upgrade to) the latest version on your VyOS device:

curl -LO --output-dir /tmp "$(curl -sSL "https://api.github.com/repos/p3lim/vyaml/releases/latest" | jq -r --arg arch "$(dpkg-architecture -q DEB_HOST_ARCH)" '.assets[] | select(.name? | match($arch + ".deb")) | .browser_download_url')"
sudo dpkg --install /tmp/vyaml*.deb
rm /tmp/vyaml*.deb

[!IMPORTANT] You will need to re-install vyaml this way after every VyOS upgrade, as VyOS is technically ephemeral.