versed

README

versed

A tool for string replacement in automation.

Rationale

In many situations when working with pipelines there is not always a good way to handle versioning. A common way to get around this is to introduce sed in a pipeline to replace certain parts. However, if you would like the versions to be stored as Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and be able to update these through a pipeline, then it's more convenient to store the data structured.

A use case which triggered this project was the poor version handling in Terraform. Terrafile implementations all relied on pulling down entire repositories beforehand which is very clumsy if working with a monorepo or multiple modules in a repository.

How it works

Versed is a lightweight approach to versioning, which basically replaces variables in text files in a given folder and puts the output in a different folder. The current version supports 2 parts as it's common with a name and version, although this is likely to become more generic.

Installation

Linux

Download the binary from the release pages and move it to a folder which is in your path. For example: ~/.local/bin would work for Ubuntu.

Others

Multiple OS builds will come, but until then, the project can be built locally. In order to build, Golang is needed. Clone the repository and run go build . in order to build an executable.

Usage

Versed requires a config file which defines what variable which should be replaced and by what concatenated value. Defaults to use versed.yml in the same folder.

versed -f test/versed.yml
versed

A versed.yml could look like this:

target: test/data
output: test/output
sources:
  testsource1: 
    source: source1
    version: v1
  testsource2:
    source: source2
    version: v2

In order for versed to update values, the target files would need to be tagged like the following, using the &(versed.SOURCE_NAME) format.

[
  "&(versed.testsource1)",
  "&(versed.testsource2)"
]

When running versed with the above config and target file, it would produce:

[
  "source1v1",
  "source2v2"
]