Install yq | A light weight yaml parser cli

yq is a command line utility for parsing and querying yaml, like jq does for json.

This is for me

I love that all of these modern tools built in go and rust, just give you a zipped up executable right from GitHub releases, but it's not necessarily straight forward how to install them. yq does one of the best jobs I have seen, giving you instructions on how to get a specific version and install it.

I use a bunch of these tools, and for what its worth I trust the devs behind them to make sure they don't break. This so far has worked out well for me, but if it ever doesn't I can always pick an older version.

Just give me the latest

Since I am all trusting of them I just want the latest version. I do not want to update a shell script with new versions, or even care about what then next version is, I just want it. Luckily you can script the release page for the latest version on all that I have came accross.

What is the latest

I wrote or stole, I think I wrote it, this line of bash quite awhile ago, and it has served me well for finding the latest release for any GitHub project using releases. Just update it with the name of the tool, org, and repo and it works.

YQ_VERSION=$(curl --silent https://github.com/mikefarah/yq/releases/latest | tr -d '"' | sed 's/^.*tag\///g' | sed 's/>.*$//g' | sed 's/^v//')

Install with your shell

Now that we know how to consistently get the right version, I generally right click the release in the releases page, replace the version with
${TOOL_VERSION} and put it in this wget call, then move the binary over to ~/.local/bin

local tmp=`mktemp -dt install-XXXXXX` pushd $tmp YQ_VERSION=$(curl --silent https://github.com/mikefarah/yq/releases/latest | tr -d '"' | sed 's/^.*tag\///g' | sed 's/>.*$//g' | sed 's/^v//') wget https://github.com/mikefarah/yq/releases/download/v${YQ_VERSION}/yq_linux_amd64.tar.gz -O- -q | tar -zxf - -C /tmp cp yq_linux_amd64 ~/.local/bin/yq popd

Install with ansible

Now I don't want to worry about missing yq again, so I am added it to my ansible install script. This way it's installed everyt time I setup a new system with all of my favorite cli's.

- name: check is yq installed
  shell: command -v yq
  register: yq_exists
  ignore_errors: yes
  tags:
    - yq

- name: Install yq
  when: yq_exists is failed
  shell: |
    local tmp=`mktemp -dt install-XXXXXX`
    pushd $tmp
    YQ_VERSION=$(curl --silent https://github.com/mikefarah/yq/releases/latest | tr -d '"' | sed 's/^.*tag\///g' | sed 's/>.*$//g' | sed 's/^v//')
    wget https://github.com/mikefarah/yq/releases/download/v${YQ_VERSION}/yq_linux_amd64.tar.gz -O- -q | tar -zxf - -C /tmp
    cp yq_linux_amd64 {{ lookup('env', 'HOME') }}/.local/bin/yq
    popd
  tags:
    - yq

Links

This is how I installed it, of course you can always follow Mike's instructions from the repo.

• yq repo
• yq docs

Comments

[Peter Benjamin (they/them)]

A similar tool to yq is dasel, which supports a number of different data format types (e.g. yaml, json, csv, xml, & toml)