ytt VS edn

YTT - YTT is a templating tool that understands YAML structure. It helps you easily configure complex software via reusable templates and user provided values using the Starlark language.

Adding https://carvel.dev/ytt/ to the list. I was happy using this tool as IMO it mixes good things from Helm and Kustomize, however the syntax is ugly and repelling my colleagues to have a closer look.

> Templating yaml is a terrible, terrible idea

I've had a good time using ytt: https://carvel.dev/ytt/. It implements language-aware templating, which is IMO the only reasonable way to do it.

`ytt` is part of the Carvel toolchain. https://carvel.dev/ytt/

I agree with you on `you will want to see just plain texts instead of a bunch of templating token with hidden logic.` Which is why I think https://carvel.dev/ytt/ would be great. We could generate these templates in pipelines, or we could just make it easier to maintain what we have.

For more advanced configuration management you might be interested in ytt ( https://carvel.dev/ytt/ ) which is a "yaml-aware" templating tool. it lets you do "patches" via an overlay mechanism to add or remove specific yaml blocks, and it also lets you use a simplified python dialect for more complicated logic. With ytt you would put your DNS IP into a "data values" file and then run ytt to render it into the configs before handing them off to the deployment tool. e.g. `ytt -f | kubectl apply`

I said this above as well: ytt (https://carvel.dev/ytt/) lets you embed starlark into valid yaml, among other cute tricks for managing biz-logic in configs.

Manifests are generated with ytt (https://carvel.dev/ytt/).

This is why you should consider https://carvel.dev/ytt/

> was utterly surprised how no one ever apparently has thought to create a configuration/templating system that's basically a fancy library on top of Scheme.

There's Clojure's extensible data notation: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

A thin language layer around edn/datalog, the query language

EDN (Extensible Data Notation) is a subset of Clojure: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

It is:

- Streamable

- Extensible

- Whitespace-insensitive, but there are formatting conventions for readability

To begin with, EDN is somewhat like the JSON of Clojure. And regarding the code is data/data is code nature of Clojure, it is Clojure. It doesn't have some of the vagaries of JSON, and it is also extensible.

Alien is not a reason something is bad, just that's it's unusual. JSON was a bit alien when it first arrived as well, as everyone was used to XML at the time.

`{num 5, val 4}` looks fine to me, but we can do even better! We already know objects/maps are always in pairs, so we don't really need that comma either. Just do `{num 5 val 4}` and we save yet another unnecessary characters.

Of course, I didn't come up with this format myself, what I actually want JSON to be is EDN (https://github.com/edn-format/edn) which is a standalone format but also directly used in Clojure, so it already exists inside a programming language and works very well. There keys are strings though, so you example would end up being `{"num" 5 "val" 5 "person" var}`, where commas are optional.

I just checked out the spec, and it gets pretty ugly in the Table section. A lot of the json examples are both shorter and IMO more precise. Stuff that’s not allowed with [table] is allowed with [[table]], and it’s confusing to understand what level of depth I’m at.

I’ll take edn over any of “em. https://github.com/edn-format/edn

As XT is written in Clojure and it natively supports Clojure’s data types, we were not satisfied with available JSON types and decided to give EDN a try - that way we would have way more supported types:

Compare the nightmare that is pickling with how simple it is to serialize pure data with edn in clojure. What ends up happening is people passing around JSONs or whatever and writing parsing/encoding code at each end, which makes things unnecessarily more complex, and dangerous, and error prone, and boring, etc...