json2hcl mit Homebrew, Nix installieren

Projektlinks

• Homepage
• Upstream-Dokumentation
• Paketmanager-Seite

Befehle und Aliase

• json2hcl

Projektgeschichte

Kevin van Zonneveld published json2hcl in September 2016 around a workflow for an internal tool named Frey. The README says the authors wanted to store infrastructure recipes as HCL after converting from machine-readable JSON, YAML, or TOML, and it explicitly notes that the tool used existing HashiCorp libraries rather than inventing a parser.

The project soon added reverse conversion with the `-reverse` flag, exposing hcl2json behavior through the same executable. By June 25, 2025, the GitHub repository was archived; its README states that the original author no longer used it, while leaving the code available for forks.

Adoptionsgeschichte

Adoption appears to have been modest but durable in package-manager terms: the tool was packaged by Homebrew and Nix, and the repository accumulated hundreds of stars and forks before archival. Its presence in Homebrew reflects the small-CLI pattern where a narrow converter remains useful even after upstream development slows.

Wie es verwendet wird

The canonical usage is Unix-pipeline oriented: feed JSON on standard input and receive HCL on standard output, or pass `-reverse` to convert HCL back to JSON. The README examples focus on Terraform-like `.tf.json` input and redirection to `.tf` files.

Warum Paket-Nerds sich dafür interessieren

json2hcl is interesting because it captures a short period when HCL was becoming a preferred human-edited configuration language around HashiCorp tools, while JSON remained the common interchange format. For package collectors, it is a tiny bridge utility whose package-manager value is convenience rather than ecosystem size.

Zeitleiste

• 2016-09-05: The GitHub repository was created.
• 2016-09-05: v0.0.4 changelog entry covered error handling and release cross-compilation.
• 2016-09-06: v0.0.5 added reverse HCL-to-JSON conversion through `-reverse`.
• 2024-09-05: GitHub listed v0.2.0 among repository releases.
• 2025-06-25: The repository was archived by its owner.

Related projects

• json2hcl is directly tied to HashiCorp HCL and Terraform-style JSON configuration. It also sits near other one-purpose data converters such as hcl2json, JSON-to-YAML tools, and Unix filters used in infrastructure repositories.

Quellen

• https://api.github.com/repos/kvz/json2hcl
• https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/json2hcl
• https://github.com/kvz/json2hcl
• https://github.com/kvz/json2hcl/releases