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Install

yq has pre-built binaries for most platforms - checkout the releases page for the latest build. Alternatively - you can use one of the methods below:

On MacOS:

brew install yq

On Ubuntu and other Linux distributions supporting snap packages:

snap install yq

Snap notes

yq installs with with strict confinement in snap, this means it doesn't have direct access to root files. To read root files you can:

sudo cat /etc/myfile | yq -r - somecommand

And to write to a root file you can either use sponge:

sudo cat /etc/myfile | yq -r - somecommand | sudo sponge /etc/myfile

or write to a temporary file:

sudo cat /etc/myfile | yq -r - somecommand | sudo tee /etc/myfile.tmp
sudo mv /etc/myfile.tmp /etc/myfile
rm /etc/myfile.tmp

On Ubuntu 16.04 or higher from Debian package:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rmescandon/yq
sudo apt update
sudo apt install yq -y

go get:

GO111MODULE=on go get github.com/mikefarah/yq/v3

Docker

Oneshot use:

docker run --rm -v ${PWD}:/workdir mikefarah/yq yq [flags] <command> FILE...

Run commands interactively:

docker run --rm -it -v ${PWD}:/workdir mikefarah/yq sh

It can be useful to have a bash function to avoid typing the whole docker command:

yq() {
  docker run --rm -i -v ${PWD}:/workdir mikefarah/yq yq $@
}