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:

Using Homebrew

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 r - a.path

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

sudo cat /etc/myfile | yq w - a.path value | sudo sponge /etc/myfile

or write to a temporary file:

sudo cat /etc/myfile | yq w - 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=3.4.0 and BINARY=yq_linux_amd64

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 "${PWD}":/workdir mikefarah/yq yq "$@"
}

Go Get:

GO111MODULE=on go get github.com/mikefarah/yq/v3

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As these are supported by the community ❤️ - however, they may be out of date with the officially supported releases.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

Mac:

Using MacPorts

sudo port selfupdate
sudo port install yq

Supported by @herbygillot (https://ports.macports.org/maintainer/github/herbygillot)

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
• Colorize the output
• Deep read a yaml file with a given path expression
• List matching paths of a given path expression
• Return the lengths of arrays/object/scalars
• Update a yaml file given a path expression or script file
• Update creates any missing entries in the path on the fly
• Deeply compare yaml files
• Keeps yaml formatting and comments when updating
• Validate a yaml file
• Create a yaml file given a deep path and value or a script file
• Prefix a path to a yaml file
• Convert to/from json to yaml
• Pipe data in by using '-'
• Merge multiple yaml files with various options for overriding and appending
• Supports multiple documents in a single yaml file for reading, writing and merging
• General shell completion scripts (bash/zsh/fish/powershell) (https://mikefarah.gitbook.io/yq/commands/shell-completion)

Usage

Check out the documentation for more detailed and advanced usage.

Usage:
  yq [flags]
  yq [command]

Available Commands:
  compare          yq x [--prettyPrint/-P] dataA.yaml dataB.yaml 'b.e(name==fr*).value'
  delete           yq d [--inplace/-i] [--doc/-d index] sample.yaml 'b.e(name==fred)'
  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 [--printMode/-p pv] sample.yaml 'b.e(name==fr*).value'
  shell-completion Generates shell completion scripts
  validate         yq v sample.yaml
  write            yq w [--inplace/-i] [--script/-s script_file] [--doc/-d index] sample.yaml 'b.e(name==fr*).value' newValue

Flags:
  -C, --colors        print with colors
  -h, --help          help for yq
  -I, --indent int    sets indent level for output (default 2)
  -P, --prettyPrint   pretty print
  -j, --tojson        output as json. By default it prints a json document in one line, use the prettyPrint flag to print a formatted doc.
  -v, --verbose       verbose mode
  -V, --version       Print version information and quit

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

Upgrade from V2

If you've been using v2 and want/need to upgrade, checkout the upgrade guide.

V4 is in development!

If you're keen - check out the alpha release here, or in docker mikefarah/yq:4-beta1 and the docs (also in beta) here.

V4 is quite different from V3 (sorry for the migration), however it will be much more similar to jq, use a similar expression syntax and therefore support much more complex functionality!

For now - new features will be held off from V3 in anticipation of the V4 build. Critical fixes / issues will still be released.

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)
• You cannot (yet) select multiple paths/keys from the yaml to be printed out (https://github.com/mikefarah/yq/issues/287) (although you can in v4!)