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

Download the latest binary

MacOS:

brew install yq

Ubuntu and other Linux distros supporting snap packages:

snap install yq

Snap notes

yq installs 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 e '.a.path' - 

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

sudo cat /etc/myfile | yq e '.a.path = "value"' - | sudo sponge /etc/myfile

or write to a temporary file:

sudo cat /etc/myfile | yq e '.a.path = "value"' | sudo tee /etc/myfile.tmp
sudo mv /etc/myfile.tmp /etc/myfile
rm /etc/myfile.tmp

wget

Use wget to download the pre-compiled binaries:

wget https://github.com/mikefarah/yq/releases/download/{VERSION}/{BINARY} -O /usr/bin/yq &&\
    chmod +x /usr/bin/yq

For instance, VERSION=4.0.0 and BINARY=yq_linux_amd64

Run with Docker

Oneshot use:

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

Go Get:

GO111MODULE=on go get github.com/mikefarah/yq/v4

Community Supported Installation methods

As these are supported by the community ❤️ - however, they may be out of date with the officially supported releases.

Windows:

choco install yq

Supported by @chillum (https://chocolatey.org/packages/yq)

Alpine Linux

• Enable edge/community repo by adding $MIRROR/alpine/edge/community to /etc/apk/repositories
• Update database index with apk update
• Install yq with apk add yq

Supported by Tuan Hoang https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/community/x86/yq

On Ubuntu 16.04 or higher from Debian package:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys CC86BB64
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rmescandon/yq
sudo apt update
sudo apt install yq -y

Supported by @rmescandon (https://launchpad.net/~rmescandon/+archive/ubuntu/yq)

Features

• Written in portable go, so you can download a lovely dependency free binary
• Uses similar syntax as jq but works with YAML and JSON files
• Fully supports multi document yaml files
• Colorized yaml output
• Deeply traverse yaml
• Sort yaml by keys
• Update yaml inplace
• Complex expressions to select and update
• Keeps yaml formatting and comments when updating (though there are issues with whitespace)
• Convert to/from json to yaml
• Pipe data in by using '-'
• General shell completion scripts (bash/zsh/fish/powershell) (https://mikefarah.gitbook.io/yq/v/v4.x/commands/shell-completion)

Usage

Check out the documentation for more detailed and advanced usage.

Usage:
  yq [flags]
  yq [command]

Available Commands:
  eval             Apply expression to each document in each yaml file given in sequence
  eval-all         Loads _all_ yaml documents of _all_ yaml files and runs expression once
  help             Help about any command
  shell-completion Generate completion script

Flags:
  -C, --colors        force print with colors
  -e, --exit-status   set exit status if there are no matches or null or false is returned
  -h, --help          help for yq
  -I, --indent int    sets indent level for output (default 2)
  -i, --inplace       update the yaml file inplace of first yaml file given.
  -M, --no-colors     force print with no colors
  -N, --no-doc        Don't print document separators (---)
  -n, --null-input    Don't read input, simply evaluate the expression given. Useful for creating yaml docs from scratch.
  -j, --tojson        output as json. Set indent to 0 to print json in one line.
  -v, --verbose       verbose mode
  -V, --version       Print version information and quit

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

Simple Example:

yq e '.a.b | length' f1.yml f2.yml 

Upgrade from V3

If you've been using v3 and want/need to upgrade, checkout the upgrade guide.

Known Issues / Missing Features

• yq attempts to preserve comment positions and whitespace as much as possible, but it does not handle all scenarios (see https://github.com/go-yaml/yaml/tree/v3 for details)