yq

a lightweight and portable command-line YAML processor

The aim of the project is to be the jq or sed of yaml files.

Install

On MacOS:

brew install yq

On Ubuntu and other Linux distros supporting snap packages:

snap install yq

Snap notes

yq installs with with strict confinement in snap, this means it doesn't have direct access to root files. To read root files you can:

sudo cat /etc/myfile | yq -r - somecommand

And to write to a root file you can either use sponge:

sudo cat /etc/myfile | yq -r - somecommand | sudo sponge /etc/myfile

or write to a temporary file:

sudo cat /etc/myfile | yq -r - somecommand | sudo tee /etc/myfile.tmp
sudo mv /etc/myfile.tmp /etc/myfile
rm /etc/myfile.tmp

On Ubuntu 16.04 or higher from Debian package:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rmescandon/yq
sudo apt update
sudo apt install yq -y

or, Download latest binary or alternatively:

GO111MODULE=on go get github.com/mikefarah/yq/v2

Run with Docker

Oneshot use:

docker run --rm -v ${PWD}:/workdir mikefarah/yq yq [flags] <command> FILE...

Run commands interactively:

docker run --rm -it -v ${PWD}:/workdir mikefarah/yq sh

It can be useful to have a bash function to avoid typing the whole docker command:

yq() {
  docker run --rm -i -v ${PWD}:/workdir mikefarah/yq yq $@
}

Features

• Written in portable go, so you can download a lovely dependency free binary
• Deep read a yaml file with a given path
• Update a yaml file given a path
• Update a yaml file given a script file
• Update creates any missing entries in the path on the fly
• Create a yaml file given a deep path and value
• Create a yaml file given a script file
• Prefix a path to a yaml file
• Convert from json to yaml
• Convert from yaml to json
• Pipe data in by using '-'
• Merge multiple yaml files where each additional file sets values for missing or null value keys.
• Merge multiple yaml files and override previous values.
• Merge multiple yaml files and append array values.
• Supports multiple documents in a single yaml file

Usage

Check out the documentation for more detailed and advanced usage.

yq is a lightweight and portable command-line YAML processor. It aims to be the jq or sed of yaml files.

Usage:
  yq [flags]
  yq [command]

Available Commands:
  delete      yq d [--inplace/-i] [--doc/-d index] sample.yaml a.b.c
  help        Help about any command
  merge       yq m [--inplace/-i] [--doc/-d index] [--overwrite/-x] [--append/-a] sample.yaml sample2.yaml
  new         yq n [--script/-s script_file] a.b.c newValue
  prefix      yq p [--inplace/-i] [--doc/-d index] sample.yaml a.b.c
  read        yq r [--doc/-d index] sample.yaml a.b.c
  write       yq w [--inplace/-i] [--script/-s script_file] [--doc/-d index] sample.yaml a.b.c newValue

Flags:
  -h, --help      help for yq
  -t, --trim      trim yaml output (default true)
  -v, --verbose   verbose mode
  -V, --version   Print version information and quit

Use "yq [command] --help" for more information about a command.

Contribute

1. scripts/devtools.sh
2. make [local] vendor
3. add unit tests
4. apply changes to go.mod
5. make [local] build
6. If required, update the user documentation
   • Update README.md and/or documentation under the mkdocs folder
   • make [local] build-docs
   • browse to docs/index.html and check your changes
7. profit