Env Variable Operators

These operators are used to handle environment variables usage in expressions and documents. While environment variables can, of course, be passed in via your CLI with string interpolation, this often comes with complex quote escaping and can be tricky to write and read.

There are three operators:

• env which takes a single environment variable name and parse the variable as a yaml node (be it a map, array, string, number of boolean)
• strenv which also takes a single environment variable name, and always parses the variable as a string.
• envsubst which you pipe strings into and it interpolates environment variables in strings using envsubst.

EnvSubst Options

You can optionally pass envsubst any of the following options:

• nu: NoUnset, this will fail if there are any referenced variables that are not set
• ne: NoEmpty, this will fail if there are any referenced variables that are empty
• ff: FailFast, this will abort on the first failure (rather than collect all the errors)

E.g: envsubst(ne, ff) will fail on the first empty variable.

See Imposing Restrictions in the envsubst documentation for more information, and below for examples.

Tip

To replace environment variables across all values in a document, envsubst can be used with the recursive descent operator as follows:

yq '(.. | select(tag == "!!str")) |= envsubst' file.yaml

Disabling env operators

If required, you can use the --security-disable-env-ops to disable env operations.