config
kdl
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config | kdl | |
---|---|---|
32 | 14 | |
6,088 | 1,032 | |
0.3% | 4.1% | |
4.5 | 5.8 | |
6 months ago | 8 days ago | |
Java | ||
Apache License 2.0 | GNU General Public License v3.0 or later |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
config
- Hocon (Human-Optimized Config Object Notation)
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XML is better than YAML
I don‘t understand why HOCON (https://github.com/lightbend/config/blob/main/HOCON.md) isn‘t used more often (at least for configuration use cases). It‘s a superset of JSON, has comments, multiline strings, optional quotes, replacement syntax. We use it at many places, and it‘s as nice at it can get.
- Toml-bench – Which toml package to use in Python?
- slf4j or System.Logger?
- TOML: Tom's Obvious Minimal Language
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Ron: Rusty Object Notation
HOCON is a great human-readable alternative to JSON. It's a superset of JSON with lots of cool features that make it both more readable and easier to use.
Here's a rundown of HOCON's main features: https://github.com/lightbend/config#features-of-hocon
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Spring and scala
"Typesafe Config" is the library generally used to read configuration files in HOCON format, which this library introduced. It's commonly used in essentially OOP/imperative Scala contexts, including Akka and its ecosystem.
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Make systemd better for Podman with Quadlet
Interesting!
For my own servers I use an internal tool that integrates apps with systemd. You point it at the output of your build system and a config file, and it produces a deb that contains systemd unit files and which registers/starts the server on install/reboot/upgrade, as a regular debian package would. Then it uploads it to the server via sftp and installs it using apt, so dependencies are resolved. As part of the build process it can download and bundle language runtimes (I use it with a JVM), it scans native binaries to find packages that the app should depend on, and you can define your config including package metadata like dependencies and systemd units using the HOCON language [1].
Upshot is you can go from a Gradle or Maven build to a running server with a few lines of config. Oh and it can build debs from any OS, so you can push from macOS and Windows too. If your server needs to depend on e.g. Postgres, you just add that dependency in your config and it'll be up and running after the push.
It also has features to turn on DynamicUser and other sandboxing features. I think I'll experiment with socket activation next, and then bundled BorgBackup.
Net/net it's pretty nice. I haven't tried with containers because many language ecosystems don't seem to really need them for many use cases. If your build tool knows how to download your language runtime and bundle it sans container by just setting up paths correctly, then going without means you can rely on your Linux distribution to keep things up to date with security patches in the background, it means networking works as you'd expect (no accidentally opened firewall ports!) and so on. SystemD knows how to configure resource isolation/cgroups and kernel sandboxing, so if you need those you can just write that into your build config and it's done. Or not, as you wish.
With a deployment tool to automate builds/pushes, systemd to supervise processes and a big beefy dedicated machine to let you scale up, I wonder how much value the container part is really still providing if you don't need the full functionality of Kubernetes.
[1] https://github.com/lightbend/config/blob/main/HOCON.md
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Introducing JXC: An extensible, expressive data language. It's a drop-in replacement for JSON and supports type annotations, numeric suffixes, base64 strings, and more!
Other similar standards: TOML, HOCON
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Jsonnet is better than YAML for generating JSON
I've also used HOCON pretty extensively for config, and it is better than both YAML and JSON for config with moderate to high complexity.
kdl
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XL: An Extensible Programming Language
IMO, there’s a wide unexplored design space between the minimalism of Lisp and richness of other languages. A programming language inspired by something like KDL (https://github.com/kdl-org/kdl) has the potential to be in a very sweet spot between the two. "Everything is a node" instead of "everything is a list" is only slightly more complicated, but also vastly more readable that a soup of parenthesis.
- Things you didn't know you could fuzz - FuzzingWeekly CW17
- Things you didn’t know you could fuzz: - FuzzingWeekly CW17
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SDLang – Simple Declarative Language
KDL is a variant of SDLang that’s worth checking out.
https://github.com/kdl-org/kdl
- KDL
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Parsing JSON is a Minefield 💣 (2018)
Either way I've got high hopes for KDL becoming the new gold standard for clean, flexible data formats that are editable by hand.
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The KDL Document Language
I'd love to understand why all the advertised implementations have permissive licenses except for the Rust implementation, which is released under the Parity Public License 7.0.0 [1]? This seems to be as restrictive as the GPL, no?
In my mind, copyleft licenses applied to infrastructural projects like kdl-rs prematurely limits their adoption and promotes the development of alternatives with more permissive licensing, since the spec is released under a Creative Commons license [2].
[1]: https://github.com/kdl-org/kdl-rs/blob/87f836134c1d901ff5ce6...
[2]: https://github.com/kdl-org/kdl/blob/785abebfc507ff6b7bdeac07...
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The KDL Document Language, an alternative to YAML/JSON/XML
p.s. if anyone is interested in helping or just wants the info, this is the tracking issue for implementations supporting 1.0 (the actual thing that just got released): https://github.com/kdl-org/kdl/issues/144
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ParserObjects Parser Combinator Library for .NET
Oh nice. It will be a nice library to use to parse KDL (https://github.com/kdl-org/kdl)
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The YAML file of Prometheus Operator has over 13k lines, one of the longest YAML files on GitHub ever
It's still in its infancy but I'm keeping an eye on kdl
What are some alternatives?
cfg4j - Modern configuration library for distributed apps written in Java.
ron - Rusty Object Notation
owner - Get rid of the boilerplate code in properties based configuration.
json5 - JSON5 — JSON for Humans
dotenv - Loads environment variables from .env for nodejs projects.
prometheus-operator - Prometheus Operator creates/configures/manages Prometheus clusters atop Kubernetes
dotenv - A twelve-factor configuration (12factor.net/config) library for Java 8+
jsonjsc - A Python JSONDecoder library for parsing out Javascript comments in JSON files.
Configur8 - Nano-library which provides the ability to define typesafe (!) configuration templates for applications.
dhall-lang - Maintainable configuration files
centraldogma - Highly-available version-controlled service configuration repository based on Git, ZooKeeper and HTTP/2
Slim - Slim is a template language whose goal is to reduce the syntax to the essential parts without becoming cryptic.