PICNIC Is Config Notation Interpreter/Converter 🦀

PICNIC

PICNIC's name is powered by AI, which immediately makes it worth your time:

Human: Please come up with a recursive name for my cli project which interprets configuration files and prints environment variables.

ChatGPT: That sounds like a useful tool! How about naming it PICNIC, which stands for "PICNIC Is Config Notation Interpreter/Converter". This fits the recursive acronym style you're looking for, and it also gives a sense of ease and simplicity, as if dealing with various config file formats is just a "picnic" with this tool.

Features

✅ Extract data from json and .env files (soon yaml, toml, csv, xml)
✅ Match keys with the same syntax as your file format
✅ Output matched results, or everything. Source it with eval
✅ Optionally spawn tiny binaries that print your values (useful when outside shell scripting, e.g. Nix)

Installation

From crates.io

cargo install picnic-rs (I'm trying to get ownership for picnic)

Usage

Some json examples. The usage is similar for other formats. picnic --help for more info.

// some.json
{
  "foo": "bar",
  "baz": {
    "quz": "qork"
  },
  "boo": [
    "bah",
    {
      "lol": "lurg"
    }
  ]
}

$ picnic some.json

Output:

baz.quz=qork; export baz.quz;
boo.0=bah; export boo.0;
boo.1.lol=lurg; export boo.1.lol;
foo=bar; export foo;

Eval the output to set the environment variables:

eval $(picnic some.json)

⭐ Matching templates

Replace the values you want to extract with $ variables:

$ picnic some.json --match '{"boo": [$BAH, "lol": $LURG] }'

Output:

BAH=bah; export BAH;
LURG=lurg; export LURG;

Similarly, eval the output to set the env variables.

📝 Custom separators and casing options

$ picnic some.json --separator _ --casing upper

Output:

BAZ_QUZ=qork; export BAZ_QUZ;
BOO_0=bah; export BOO_0;
BOO_1_LOL=lurg; export BOO_1_LOL;
FOO=bar; export FOO;

💾 Spawn binaries

$ picnic some.json --spawn /tmp

Generates:

$ ls /tmp
foo
baz.quz
boo.0
boo.1.lol

Outputs:

$ ./foo
bar

$ ./baz.quz
qork

$ ./boo.0
bah

$ ./boo.1.lol
lurg

↩︎ Pipe stdin to picnic

curl -o some.json http://config.com/some_json_i_know_not_to_be_malicious.json 
eval $(cat some.json | picnic)

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open an issue or submit a PR.

License

APACHE-2.0 and MIT

Disclaimer

Do not eval output or generate binaries from unknown files!