yam-sort 1.0

does basic diff-ing of YAML files while ignoring key-order

Purpose

Ever needed to compare two YAML files, when the keys were out of order?
Maybe you've tried cutting and pasting to move the keys around, wondering if there's a better way?
Well, now there is - yam_sort!

Okay, I may have been watching too much late-night TV. But this library was born out of frustration working with YAML files. I was using AWS API-Gateway YAML templates, which sometimes get exported in random order (especially when there are changes to it), making it hard to compare with git-checked-in copies. After the nth time moving keys around, I decided to automate it.

• Do basic diff-ing of YAML files, while ignoring the order of keys/sub-keys.
• Re-order a second dictionary/YAML file, to match the first file. Ignore missing keys, move extra keys to end of list.

This is a very narrowly-focussed library - it sorts one YAML file to match the key-order in another YAML file. But I don't know of any other automated way of doing this, and got tired of doing it manually.

Pip Requirements

• PyYAML==5.1.2
• virtualenv (optional, but highly recommended)

Installation

# activate a virtual environment
pip install yam_sort

Usage

yam_sort -h  
yam_sort -s file_one file_two  # synchronizes second file with first, 
                                 writes to stdout
yam_sort -s file_one file_two -o  # synchronizes second file with first, 
                                    overwrites second file
yam_sort -k file_one file_two  # lists key-differences between files

optional arguments:
  -h, --help                                   show this help message and exit
  -s first second, --sync file_one file_two    sync two YAML files
  -o, --overwrite                              saves output to second file
  -k first second, --keys file_one file_two    diff two YAML files by keys only

Note

Since the intent of this library is to compare YAML files that were exported from AWS API-Gateways, the resulting sorted-file has to be as similar as possible. This includes formatting of the keys/values in the file. AWS exports keys as unquoted, and all string-values as quoted. Therefore, this library copies the formatting from the original file, in the output-file. If a string was double-quoted, it will (should) be double-quoted in the output, and the same for single-quoting, etc.

Known Bugs

Some values can be multi-line, particularly in the section:

• x-amazon-apigateway-gateway-responses:

These do not get properly copied over to the output-dict.