hcledit always formats the output

[infraredgirl]

Given the following hcl file file.hcl (notice no spaces surrounding the equals sign):

resource "foo" "bar" {
  attr1="val1"
}

hcledit attribute append resource.foo.bar.attr2 '"val2"' -f file.hcl --newline outputs the following (notice spaces were added surrounding the equals sign for attr1):

resource "foo" "bar" {
  attr1 = "val1"

  attr2 = "val2"
}

This is not always a desirable behavior, e.g. when a single small change is done to a large unformatted hcl file, the diff will appear huge, even though most of it is only formatting changes.

Can we have a flag (e.g. --no-format or similar) that makes hcledit not apply formatting? (The user can always opt to apply formatting manually after running hcledit.)

[minamijoyo]

@infraredgirl Thank you for your suggestion!

It makes sense that we should not format unchanged parts. However, the hclwrite package we depend on has no way to adjust whitespaces in a specific token. That is to say, if no formatting is applied at all, the output will look like the following:

resource "foo" "bar" {
  attr1="val1"

attr2= "val2"
}

I guess this is not what you expect.

Applying formatting to newly added parts is not as easy as it sounds. I have asked about a related topic in the upstream hcl repository: hashicorp/hcl#316
The answer was to format all the output because a surgical update operation doesn’t have enough context surrounding the change. It is unclear what the correct indentation is, particularly if the input is unformatted.