civlua VS tanka

http://civboot.org is basically trying to answer exactly this question

I'm designing a simple dev environment from scratch.

My solution for this is a sandboxed lua for programatic configuration:

https://github.com/civboot/civlua/tree/main/lib/luck

I can't stand JSON (for many reasons) so I created a serialization format that combines it and CSV for nested objects

https://github.com/civboot/civlua/tree/main/lib/tso

I wish the industry would standardize on a solution like this. IMO you shouldn't use a "real" language unless you can lock it down to be determinisitic. JSON is supposed to be human readable but fails for lots of real-world data like multi-line strings or lists of records.

CSV is more readable but doesn't supported nested objects.

Have you tried for any length of time?

For example, there's lots of little places where aligning keywords helps clarify code

https://github.com/civboot/civlua/blob/main/ds/ds.lua#L89

Formatters HATE putting multiple statements on a single line, but when they go it makes it so much easier to parse (for a person)

I've built a lua-based markdown which is more sane (from a programmer's PoV) than markdown but still concise

https://github.com/civboot/civlua/tree/main/cxt

I'm planning on supporting syntax highlighting. I could imagine creating a cxx that does what LuaX is doing, except it would support rendering to the command line as well as html.

Want to team up?

Reading "big features" like "multi line input" makes me feel more than ever that we really need an ultra light weight embeddedable text editor.

I wrote one, and while it's not yet complete I can say it's really _not that hard_

https://github.com/civboot/civlua/blob/main/ele/README.md

Sam was one of my main inspirations in starting http://civboot.org. Awesome to see he's managed to make his own chip now!

I would recommend implementing a similar API to Grafana Tanka: https://tanka.dev

When you "synthesise", the returned value should be an array or an object.

1. If it's an object, check if it has an `apiVersion` and `kind` key. If it does, yield that as a kubernetes object and do not recurse.

Maybe you'd like jsonnet: https://jsonnet.org/

I find it particularly useful for configurations that often have repeated boilerplate, like ansible playbooks or deploying a bunch of "similar-but" services to kubernetes (with https://tanka.dev).

Dhall is also quite interesting, with some tradeoffs: https://dhall-lang.org/

A few years ago I did a small comparison by re-implementing one of my simpler ansible playbooks: https://github.com/retzkek/ansible-dhall-jsonnet

- validation is often impractical (at least identifying exactly where the error is… I’m looking at you Helm!)

Unrelated to OP, but you can leverage Tanka to extend helm charts with functionality not provided by upstream.

https://tanka.dev/

Although jsonette might be considered more complex Tanka is a great alternative for k8s config management.

At Grafana Labs we're using jsonnet at scale, while being a powerful functional language it is also excellent for rendering JSON/YAML config. We have developed Tanka[0] to work with Kubernetes, for other purposes I can recommend this course[1] (authored by me).

[0] https://tanka.dev/

[1] https://jsonnet-libs.github.io/jsonnet-training-course/

If you're hitting the limits of Kustomize, maybe look at Tanka as well.

Yes, try Tanka.

yes. basically. and this is a path that multiple people are trying to solve. e.g. AWS CDK8s, https://tanka.dev/, etc

Compose would be awesome.

http://tanka.dev

(Note I work for Grafana Labs who fund Tanka and use it for all production config)