Sort Keys

The Sort Keys operator sorts maps by their keys (based on their string value). This operator does not do anything to arrays or scalars (so you can easily recursively apply it to all maps).

Sort is particularly useful for diffing two different yaml documents:

yq -i -P 'sort_keys(..)' file1.yml
yq -i -P 'sort_keys(..)' file2.yml
diff file1.yml file2.yml

Note that yq does not yet consider anchors when sorting by keys - this may result in invalid yaml documents if you are using merge anchors.

For more advanced sorting, using to_entries to convert the map to an array, then sort/process the array as you like (e.g. using sort_by) and convert back to a map using from_entries. See here for an example.

Sort keys of map

Given a sample.yml file of:

c: frog
a: blah
b: bing

then

yq 'sort_keys(.)' sample.yml

will output

a: blah
b: bing
c: frog

Sort keys recursively

Note the array elements are left unsorted, but maps inside arrays are sorted

Given a sample.yml file of:

bParent:
  c: dog
  array:
    - 3
    - 1
    - 2
aParent:
  z: donkey
  x:
    - c: yum
      b: delish
    - b: ew
      a: apple

then

yq 'sort_keys(..)' sample.yml

will output

aParent:
  x:
    - b: delish
      c: yum
    - a: apple
      b: ew
  z: donkey
bParent:
  array:
    - 3
    - 1
    - 2
  c: dog