DEV Community: dev264

Config-file-validator v1.8.0 released!

dev264 — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 20:40:19 +0000

We have just released a big update to the config-file-validator. All new functionality was added by the OSS community during Hacktoberfest 2024. Thank you to all who contributed! Some highlights:

Environment variables can be used in place of or in addition to command line arguments
Sarif report output now available
Redesigned report output. You can now request multiple report types and if each type should go to stdout or be saved to a file.
Searching for config files using glob patterns

Don't forget, there is also a Github Action for easily integrating configuration file validation into your Github Actions workflow.

jobs:
  validate-config-files:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: kehoe/validate-configs-action@v4

Config-file-validator v1.7.0 released!

dev264 — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 17:12:50 +0000

We have just released a big update to the config-file-validator. New features include:

Added the --quiet flag to disable stdout
Added the --group-by argument to organize output by pass/fail, file type, and/or directory
Added support for EditorConfig, .env, and HOCON validation
Added junit output to the --reporter argument to produce junit results as stdout or as a file. This is useful for CI tools like Gitlab CI that can consume and report on junit test results
Performance improvements to file system finder which recursively scans directories for configuration files

Don't forget, there is also a Github Action for easily integrating configuration file validation into your Github Actions workflow.

jobs:
  validate-config-files:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: kehoe/validate-configs-action@v4

It’s time to start validating your project’s configuration files as part of your CI/CD pipeline

dev264 — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 23:50:37 +0000

Configuration files are often an overlooked part of the code base but syntax errors in config files are one of the main causes of production bugs. They can also cause failures in expensive CI/CD test operations such as infrastructure provisioning or functional test execution. You don’t want to wait until late in your pipeline to discover that there is a syntax error in your configuration files.

Teams mistakenly believe that their unit tests will catch errors in configuration file syntax but that often isn’t the case. Unit tests usually avoid reading in configuration files from the file system instead opting to mock the read-in configuration with an object. Even if tests do read in the configuration files there are typically different configuration files for each environment such as dev, test, staging, and prod so you’d have to make sure to cover each file in your tests. Also for some DevSecOps tools that are heavily driven by configuration files there is no unit test suite to use to validate the configuration files.

There are a couple tools to help with this:

Dhall - configuration files as code
config-file-validator - single tool to validate the syntax of every popular configuration file type. Has a github action that you can integrate into an existing GitHub actions workflow (full disclosure - this is my project)

These tools can run during the lint or static analysis stages of your pipeline and make sure that simple syntax errors are caught early in the pipeline rather than later during costly testing stages or production release

Config-file-validator v1.5.0 Released!

dev264 — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 17:36:04 +0000

We have just released a huge update to the config-file-validator:

Added support for specifying multiple search paths
Added --depth CLI argument to customize recursion depth with scanning search paths
Added --version CLI flag to display the current config-file-validator version
Added support for HCL, CSV, Properties, and Apple PList XML validation

There is also a Github Action for easily integrating configuration file validation into your Github Actions workflow.

All of the updates were from members of the OSS Community!

Have multiple config file types in a project? Here’s a single tool to validate them all!

dev264 — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 16:35:23 +0000

Sharing a project my team and I open-sourced around 10 months ago. We do a lot of devops/infra work which required creating and editing different types of config files. We wanted to test that the syntax of those config files was valid but didn’t want to have to use a bunch of different syntax validator tools. We wanted a single (cross platform) tool to validate all the different types and group the output into a single report. We couldn’t find anything that would do what we wanted so we created the config-file-validator project. We currently support XML, JSON, HCL, YAML, Properties, INI, and TOML with CSV and Apple PList on the way (PR’s in-review).

Check it out and let us know what you think!

Project Link: https://github.com/Boeing/config-file-validator

Releases: https://github.com/Boeing/config-file-validator/releases