HCL

HCL, aka HashiCorp configuration language, is a data notation created in 2014.

#249on PLDB	9Years Old	5.7kUsers
2Books	1Papers	180kRepos

Try now: Riju

HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) is a configuration language built by HashiCorp. The goal of HCL is to build a structured configuration language that is both human and machine friendly for use with command-line tools, but specifically targeted towards DevOps tools, servers, etc. HCL is also fully JSON compatible. That is, JSON can be used as completely valid input to a system expecting HCL. This helps makes systems interoperable with other systems. HCL is heavily inspired by libucl, nginx configuration, and others similar.

HCL is developed on GitHub and has 4,132 stars
HCL docs
There are at least 180,390 HCL repos on GitHub
HCL first developed in HashiCorp
file extensions for HCL include hcl, nomad, tf, tfvars and workflow
The Google BigQuery Public Dataset GitHub snapshot shows 2k users using HCL in 3k repos on GitHub
Monaco package for syntax highlighting HCL
GitHub supports syntax highlighting for HCL
HTML of this page generated by LanguagePage.ts

Example from the web:

variable "ami" {
   description = "the AMI to use"
}
<<FOO
hello
world
FOO

Example from Riju:

output = "Hello, world!"

Example from Linguist:

consul = "1.2.3.4"

// This is a comment
template "foo" {
  bar = "zip"
}

Keywords in HCL

var local path for_each any string number bool true false null if else endif for in endfor

Feature	Supported	Token	Example
Conditionals	✓
Booleans	✓	true false
MultiLine Comments	✓	/* */	/* A comment */
Strings	✓
Comments	✓		// A comment
Line Comments	✓	//	// A comment
Semantic Indentation	X

title	authors	year	publisher
Beginning HCL Programming: Using Hashicorp Language for Automation and Configuration	Riti, Pierluigi	2021	Apress
Beginning HCL Programming	Pierluigi Riti; David Flynn	20210411	Springer Nature

HCL - Data notation

Keywords in HCL

Language features

Books about HCL from ISBNdb

Publications about HCL from Semantic Scholar