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CLI Tools

The command-line interface (CLI) of Rickle significantly amplifies its power and usability, providing developers with a streamlined way to manipulate configuration files directly from the terminal — no need for verbose scripting or additional tooling.

With just one command, Rickle allows seamless conversion between widely used formats like YAML and JSON (or TOML, INI, XML). Whether you're adapting to different tech stacks or maintaining compatibility across systems, Rickle eliminates the friction of manual format translation.

But Rickle’s CLI isn’t just about format conversion—it also supports on-the-fly schema validation and generation. This empowers users to quickly validate data integrity against a schema or generate new schemas from existing structured data, which is especially useful in prototyping, CI/CD pipelines, and collaborative API development.

The CLI turns complex configuration management into a series of simple, declarative commands. It’s a developer-friendly interface for anyone who works with structured data — and needs that data to be correct, convertible, and easy to handle.

Getting Started

To see help and usage:

rickle -h

Which will show the list of available options:

positional arguments:
  {conv,obj,serve,schema}
    conv                Converting files between formats
    obj                 Tool for reading or editing  objects
    serve               Serving objects through http(s)
    schema              Generating and checking schemas of YAML files

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --version, -v         show version number
  --output-type         output file type (default = YAML)

Note

Outputs may differ from the documentation.

serve not showing?

If twisted is not installed the serve copmmand will not appear.

To install this functionality:

pip install rickle[net]

The main tools that the rickle CLI exposes are:

Command Description
conv Convert between serialisation types
obj CRUD config data
schema Generate and check schemas
serve Host config server

All of which are discussed in the following sections.

Input/Output to Tools

All CLI tools support Unix pipes, i.e., the output of the previous command or process will be used as input. For example:

cat config.yml | rickle obj get /

type config.yml | rickle obj get /

Note

On Windows systems the command type can be used instead of cat.

This is the preferred usage of rickle. Similarly, the output can always be piped or redirected:

cat config.yaml | rickle obj get /config/database > db_config.yaml

or for example:

cat config.yaml | rickle obj get /config/ecr/password | aws ecr get-login-password --password-stdin

For all tools, the input can be a file flagged with --input and output can be directed to a file with --output:

rickle obj --input config.yaml --output db_config.yaml get /config/database

Although this is often a less readable way and is only recommended when it makes sense to do so.

Output Types

For most of the tools, the output types can be specified with the --output-type flag and can be one of the following:

Type Installation Input Output
yaml pip install rickle
json pip install rickle
toml pip install rickle
xml pip install rickle[xml]
ini pip install rickle
env pip install rickle[dotenv]

Note

The default output type for all tools (except serve) will be based on what the input is. For serve, the default output is JSON.

Certain tools have more output type options. Both search and type have ARRAY and PYTHON as extra types.