Support for erb statements within deployment manifests?

[MatthiasWinzeler]

With the ruby cli, it was possible to embed ERB statements in deployment manifest that were executed when deploying.

Example: https://github.com/pivotal-cf/cf-rabbitmq-release/blob/v229.2.0/docs/bosh_rabbitmq.md#unclustered-rabbit-with-customised-configuration

Currently, the new golang cli does not execute ERB code in deployment manifest which makes constructs as the one above impossible. Are there any plans to support this?

[dpb587-pivotal]

That particular behavior was intentionally removed from the new CLI. We wanted to avoid the extra-dynamic ruby behavior in favor of a more declarative syntax. We also didn't want to be encouraging release authors to be distributing manifests where ruby/erb was a dependency.

We're not bringing back ERB support into the CLI commands, so now we're recommending the usage of ops files. The combination of variables and YAML manipulations can hopefully provide you with sufficient functionality for the use cases you need.

If you have any questions on those ops files, or have scenarios where they don't appear to work for your needs, please feel free to bring them up here or in slack so we can figure out recommendations/improvements we can make.

[MatthiasWinzeler]

Thank you @dpb587-pivotal for your explanation.
That sounds reasonable to me. I don't see a lot of cases where one would really rely on this behavior so I guess this can be fixed in the respective releases rather easily. Will bring it up with them.