Inspecting BOSH manifests in Bash

As mentioned yesterday, BOSH manifests can be huge – 3000 lines of YAML for deploying Cloud Foundry into bosh-lite for example. I wanted to quickly pull out information from a manifest.

yaml2json

This little CLI will convert YAML to JSON.

go get github.com/bronze1man/yaml2json

We can pipe any BOSH deployment manifest into it and out comes JSON:

cat cf-manifest.yml yaml2json

jq

It’s now a single huge line of JSON. As introduced previously, for this we can use jq (visit the site and click Download).

$ cat cf-manifest.yml yaml2json | jq .
{
  "compilation": {
    "cloud_properties": {
      "name": "random"
    },
    "network": "cf1",
    "reuse_compilation_vms": true,
    "workers": 6
  },
  "director_uuid": "c6f166bd-ddac-4f7d-9c57-d11c6ad5133b",
...

Oh this is looking very nice.

Q & A

What is the director_uuid of the manifest?

$ cat cf-manifest.yml | yaml2json | jq -r .director_uuid
c6f166bd-ddac-4f7d-9c57-d11c6ad5133b

What releases are included in the manifest?

$ cat cf-manifest.yml | yaml2json | jq -r jq -r ".releases"
[
  {
    "name": "cf",
    "version": 200
  }
]

What are the names of the jobs?

$ cat cf-manifest.yml | yaml2json | jq -r ".jobs[].name"
ha_proxy_z1
nats_z1
nats_z2
etcd_z1
etcd_z2
...

What stemcell is being used for the first resource pool?

$ cat cf-manifest.yml | yaml2json | jq -r ".resource_pools[0].stemcell"
{
  "name": "bosh-warden-boshlite-ubuntu-trusty-go_agent",
  "version": 389
}

There are lots of possibilities to scan many BOSH deployment manifests quickly and easily with simple Bash scripts.