Walk-CLI

A utility to parse, select and transform YAML/JSON strings in a *NIX pipe.

Sometimes your scripts will perform API calls or cat files containing a big amount of YAML or JSON and all you need is to transform it to something more readable, or easier to digest in the next step of the pipe.

That's what Walk-CLI is all about.

Basic usage

walkcli -t "template"

• template: is a template written in the GoWalker format. It's somewhat similar to what you would use in JavaScript template literals, as it uses the ${...} notation to open templates, and the dot notation to navigate data structures.

• stdin: the program will wait for a standard input to digest. You can input the text after running the program or use a pipe.

Examples

• cat myfile.json | walkcli -t '${user.id}'
• cat products.json | walkcli -t '${item[0]'

Pretty-print and conversion

The output of walkcli can be any string. If you, however, are in need to output JSON or YAML, there's a couple of switches which may improve your experience.

• -j: parses the output string as a JSON and beautifies it
• -c: adds colors to the output JSON
• -y: parses the output string as a YAML

Obviously if you use one of the parsers, the process will only succeed if the output string is syntactically correct.

External templates

Sometimes the desired output needs to be something more complex than a string or two. In this case inlining the template won't do it. To solve this problem, you can reference external template files.

in the --template argument, provide, instead, a path to file preceded by file:// as in file://my_templates/main.templ.

Requirements:

• Template files must have an extension. We recommend .templ
• The template format is the one described in GoWalker

IMPORTANT: the engine will load the provided file and use it as main template, but will also load all the other files in the same directory as sub-templates. We therefore recommend that you use one directory for task.