jsonnet
nixpkgs
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jsonnet | nixpkgs | |
---|---|---|
48 | 973 | |
6,753 | 15,656 | |
1.0% | 5.3% | |
8.4 | 10.0 | |
9 days ago | 1 day ago | |
Jsonnet | Nix | |
Apache License 2.0 | MIT License |
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.
jsonnet
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A Reasonable Configuration Language
jsonnet[1] and kapitan[2] are the tools I currently use. Their learning curve is not optimal (and I tried to contribute to smoothen it with a jsonnet course[3] and a 'get started wit kapitan' blog post[4]), but once used to it it's hard to do without, and their combination makes them even more useful (esp. if you deploy K8s).
In Ruud's case, Jsonnet might have been worth looking at as Hashicorp tools can be configured with json in addition to HCL. But that would have been less fun I guess ;-)
I hope for Ruud it finds its niche, there's quite some competition in this field!
1: https://jsonnet.org/
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Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration
Kubernetes config is a decent example. I had ChatGPT generate a representative silly example -- the content doesn't matter so much as the structure:
https://gist.github.com/cstrahan/528b00cd5c3a22e3d8f057bb1a7...
Now consider 100s (if not 1000s) of such files.
I haven't given Pkl an in depth look yet, but I can say that the Industry Standard™ of "simple YAML" + string substitution (with delicate, error prone indentation -- since YAML is indentation sensitive) is easily beat by any of:
- https://jsonnet.org/
- https://nickel-lang.org/
- https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/language/index.html
- https://dhall-lang.org/
- (insert many more here, probably including Pkl)
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Introduction to Jsonnet: The YAML/JSON templating language
jsonnet cli: link
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10 Ways for Kubernetes Declarative Configuration Management
Jsonnet: A data template language implemented in C++, suitable for application and tool developers, can generate configuration data and organize, simplify and manage large configurations without side effects.
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-❄️- 2023 Day 4 Solutions -❄️-
[Language: Jsonnet] (on GitHub)
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What Is Wrong with TOML?
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
- Show HN: Keep – GitHub Actions for your monitoring tools
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That people produce HTML with string templates is telling us something
Apologies for the lack of context, and for missing this comment until today.
Both are tools for defining kubernetes manifests (which are YAML) in a reusable manner.
Jsonnet is a formally specified extension of JSON. It’s essentially a functional programming language (w/some object oriented features) that generates config files in JSON/YAML/etc, so it’s straightforward to determine whether an input file is valid, and to throw an error that points to an exact line if it’s not. It has a high learning curve, especially for people whose only experience is with imperative languages.
https://jsonnet.org/
Helm charts also generate YAML/JSON config files, but they use Go templating. This is easier and faster to understand, since it’s mostly string substitution and not much logic (there’s conditionals, iterators, and very basic helper functions). Unfortunately a simple typo or mistake can cause errors that are difficult to diagnose (the message may indicate a problem far away in code from the actual mistake). It can also generate output that’s valid according to the string templating rules, but not what was intended, which can be very confusing to debug.
Despite these shortcomings, the vast majority of kubernetes applications are distributed as helm charts. I understand why things ended up this way, but I still wish it were more common for people to invest the upfront effort to learn the superior tool, so it could be more widespread.
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TOML: Tom's Obvious Minimal Language
I like Google's Jsonnet [1], which has all of this except for 4.
Jsonnet is quite mature, with fairly wide language adoption, and has the benefit of supporting expressions, including conditionals, arithmetic, as well as being able to define reusable blocks inside function definitions or external files.
It's not suitable as a serialization format, but great for config. It's popular in some circles, but I'm sad that it has not reached wider adoption.
[1] https://jsonnet.org/
- Jsonnet – The Data Templating Language
nixpkgs
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Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commits?author=neon-sunset
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Eelco Dolstra's leadership is corrosive to the Nix project
I see two signers in the top 6 displayed on https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/graphs/contributors
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3rd Edition of Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ by Stroustrup
For a single file script, nix can make the package management quite easy: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/doc/languages-f...
For example,
```
- NixOS/nixpkgs: There isn't a clear canonical way to refer to a specific package
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NixOS Is Not Reproducible
Yes, Nix doesn't actually ensure that the builds are deterministic. In fact it works just fine if they aren't. There are packages in nixpkgs that aren't reproducible: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aiss...
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The xz attack shell script
I'm not familiar with Bazel, but Nix in it's current form wouldn't have solved this attack. First of all, the standard mkDerivation function calls the same configure; make; make install process that made this attack possible. Nixpkgs regularly pulls in external resources (fetchUrl and friends) that are equally vulnerable to a poisoned release tarball. Checkout the comment on the current xz entry in nixpkgs https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/tools/comp...
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Debian Git Monorepo
NixOS uses a monorepo and I think everyone's love it.
I love being able to easily grep through all the packages source code and there's regularly PRs that harmonizes conventions across many packages.
Nixpkgs doesn't include the packaged software source code, so it's a lot more practical than what Debian is doing.
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs
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From xz to ibus: more questionable tarballs
In this specific case, nix uses fetchFromGitHub to download the source archive, which are generated by GitHub for the specified revision[1]. Arch seems to just download the tarball from the releases page[2].
[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/3c2fdd0a4e6396fc310a6e...
[2]: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/ib...
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GitHub Disabled the Xz Repo
True, but irrelevant -- _some packages_, _somewhere_, do depend on xz, which, if built, requires pulling the source from GitHub (see the default.nix: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-23.11/pkgs/tools...)
It's not the vulnerability that's a problem right now (NixOS was protected by a couple of factors) but rather GitHub's hamfisted response.
That is the problem.
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Combining Nix with Terraform for better DevOps
We’ve noticed that some users have been asking about how to use older versions of Terraform in their Nix setups [1, 2]. This is an example of the diverse needs of people and the importance of maintaining backward compatibility. We hope that nixpkgs-terraform will be a useful tool for these users.
What are some alternatives?
kube-libsonnet - Bitnami's jsonnet library for building Kubernetes manifests
asdf - Extendable version manager with support for Ruby, Node.js, Elixir, Erlang & more
dhall-lang - Maintainable configuration files
Home Manager using Nix - Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@rycee]
cue - CUE has moved to https://github.com/cue-lang/cue
git-lfs - Git extension for versioning large files
cue - The home of the CUE language! Validate and define text-based and dynamic configuration
easyeffects - Limiter, compressor, convolver, equalizer and auto volume and many other plugins for PipeWire applications
json5 - JSON5 — JSON for Humans
spack - A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.
cdk8s - Define Kubernetes native apps and abstractions using object-oriented programming
waydroid - Waydroid uses a container-based approach to boot a full Android system on a regular GNU/Linux system like Ubuntu.