Ability to dump configuration to JSON

[boosh]

Hi,

It'd be really useful to be able to access the expanded YAML with all inheritance expanded, etc. so the configuration can be converted/processed with other tools as normal YAML. I'm trying to use configure to make it easy to generate JSON, but json.dumps() won't work :-(

Really useful module, thanks!

[Andrey Popp]

configure uses YAML tags to specify configuration actions — it would be difficult to do that for JSON. Could you explain why you want use JSON or what is your use case?
—
Andrey Popp

On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 7:38 PM, 0d51e69a [e-mail] wrote:

Hi,
It'd be really useful to be able to dump the parsed configuration to different output formats, especially JSON.

Really useful module, thanks!

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#3

[boosh]

I'd like to use configure to help me generate Amazon CloudFormation templates. For example I might represent a template with the following YAML:

AWSTemplateFormatVersion: 2010-09-09
Description: Sets up an RP tier, web tier and a master. No pre-existing EIPs are required.

Parameters:
  InstanceType: &InstanceType
    Description: Default EC2 instance type
    Type: String
    Default: t1.micro
    NoEcho: "False"         # Booleans must be quoted
    AllowedValues:
    - t1.micro
    - m1.small
    - m1.medium
    ConstraintDescription: Must be a valid EC2 instance type.

  MasterInstanceType:
    <<: *InstanceType
    Description: Master EC2 instance type

Mappings:
  AWSInstanceType2Arch:
    t1.micro:
      - Arch: "64"        # numbers must be quoted
    m1.small:
      - Arch: "64"
    m1.medium:
      - Arch: "64"

  AWSRegionArch2AMI:
    eu-west-1:
      - 32: ami-018bb975
      - 64: ami-f2191786

...

I'd then like to be able to load this using configure (so I can use composition, inheritance between files, etc) and output JSON.

Also, I only want a "one-way" translation from YAML to JSON of the final compiled data structure since the JSON will be used as an input into the Amazon API - I won't ever want to translate it back to YAML.

I've implemented something that works with PyYAML (https://bitbucket.org/boosh/jayc/src - in fact because this is simpler it can convert both ways). But since configure adds additional useful features, it'd be awesome if it was possible to dump the internal data structure to JSON. I tried to get it working with configure but the json dumper kept giving me errors that I couldn't resolve.

Thanks

[Andrey Popp]

@boosh right, this is because json doesn't know how to handle configure.Configuration. I suggest you to use jsonpublish library to deal with such use cases — there's an example https://gist.github.com/andreypopp/7104f64dc583de94835c

[Andrey Popp]

I think we can close this issue.

[boosh]

That's great, thanks.