Configuration Language
Configuration Language on the APIs.io network is a curated area collecting 9 resources — specifications, tools, and documentation — for this subject.
24 providers on the network work in this area, including Cribl, Kustomize, Carvel, Amazon Secrets Manager, AWS CloudFormation, Mockaroo, and 18 more — each links out to that provider’s APIs, schemas, and governance artifacts.
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About this area
Configuration languages are formats and DSLs used to express the desired state of software systems, infrastructure, applications, and APIs. Configuration languages span a spectrum from simple text-based formats (INI, JSON, YAML, TOML) to typed and templated formats (HCL, Cue, Dhall, Pkl, Jsonnet, KDL) that support imports, schemas, and validation. The choice of configuration language shapes how teams describe Kubernetes manifests, Terraform infrastructure, OpenAPI specs, CI pipelines, and developer environments.
Curated resources (9)
YAML
YAML Ain't Markup Language is a human-friendly data serialization language. YAML 1.2 is widely used for configuration in Kubernetes, OpenAPI, GitHub Actions, Ansible, and many other ecosystems. YAML supports comments,...
JSON
JavaScript Object Notation is a lightweight data interchange format defined by RFC 8259 and ECMA-404. JSON is heavily used as a configuration format in Node.js (package.json), VS Code settings, and many other tools, a...
TOML
Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language is a config file format designed to be human-readable and unambiguous. TOML is used by Cargo for Rust projects, Python packaging via pyproject.toml, and Hugo site config.
HCL
HashiCorp Configuration Language is a structured configuration language designed for human authoring of complex configurations. HCL underpins Terraform, Packer, Vault, Consul, and Nomad and supports expressions, varia...
Cue
Cue is an open source data validation language with a powerful type system and unification semantics. Cue is used to validate, generate, and transform configuration for Kubernetes, OpenAPI, and Terraform.
Dhall
Dhall is a programmable configuration language that adds types and functions to JSON and YAML. Dhall expressions are total (always terminate) and remote imports are content-addressed for safety.
Pkl
Pkl is Apple's open source configuration language with a focus on type safety, composition, and runtime templating. Pkl can render to YAML, JSON, plist, and other formats and offers IDE tooling and language bindings.
Jsonnet
Jsonnet is a data templating language designed for elegant generation of JSON and YAML. It is used heavily for Kubernetes manifests, Grafana dashboards (Grafonnet), and Bazel-based tooling.
KDL
KDL is a node-oriented document language combining the readability of YAML and TOML with a unique tree-shaped grammar. KDL is used by Zellij, Helix, and other tools.
Related providers (45)
Top 24 of 45 network providers tagged for this area — search the full set on apis.io.
| Provider | Description | APIs | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cribl | Cribl is an observability pipeline company providing a suite of products for collecting, processing, routing, searching, and storing telemetry data at scale. Cribl's developer p... | 6 | developing |
| Kustomize | Kustomize is a Kubernetes-native configuration management tool that lets you customize untemplated YAML files for multiple purposes, leaving the original YAML intact and usable ... | 1 | minimal |
| Carvel | Carvel is a set of reliable, single-purpose, composable command-line tools that help build, configure, and deploy applications to Kubernetes. The toolset includes ytt for YAML t... | 7 | minimal |
| Amazon Secrets Manager | Amazon Secrets Manager helps you manage, retrieve, and rotate database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle. It provides centralized secrets manag... | 1 | strong |
| AWS CloudFormation | A collection of APIs provided by AWS for infrastructure as code provisioning and management of AWS and third-party resources using CloudFormation templates and the Cloud Control... | 2 | strong |
| Mockaroo | Mockaroo is a realistic mock data generator and API mocking service used by developers and QA teams to produce JSON, CSV, TXT, custom-delimited, SQL, and XML test data. The plat... | 1 | developing |
| Databricks Asset Bundles | Databricks Asset Bundles (DABs) provide an infrastructure-as-code approach to managing Databricks data and AI projects. Bundles enable version control, CI/CD, deployment, and ma... | 1 | developing |
| Amazon Proton | AWS Proton is a managed service for platform engineers that helps them publish standardized container and serverless application templates to empower developers. It provides aut... | 1 | developing |
| Cycloid | Cycloid is a unified Internal Developer Portal & Platform combining self-service Service Catalogs (Stacks and StackForms), Infrastructure as Code orchestration, multi-cloud asse... | 1 | developing |
| Amazon CloudFormation | AWS CloudFormation is an infrastructure-as-code service that speeds up cloud provisioning by enabling developers to define and manage AWS resources programmatically through temp... | 1 | developing |
| Ansible Automation Platform | Ansible Automation Platform (formerly Ansible Tower) provides a REST API for managing automation workflows, job templates, inventories, credentials, and projects. The API enable... | 4 | developing |
| Crossplane | Crossplane is a graduated CNCF open-source Kubernetes add-on that transforms a cluster into a universal control plane for cloud infrastructure, services, and applications. Cross... | 1 | developing |
| Google Cloud Secret Manager | Google Cloud Secret Manager is a secure and convenient storage system for API keys, passwords, certificates, and other sensitive data. It provides a central place to manage, acc... | 1 | developing |
| HashiCorp Consul | HashiCorp Consul is a distributed, highly available service-networking control plane that automates network configuration, discovers services, enables secure service-to-service ... | 1 | developing |
| Chef | Chef (Progress Chef) provides infrastructure automation, compliance, and application delivery tooling. Chef exposes REST APIs for the Infra Server (managing nodes, cookbooks, ro... | 4 | developing |
| Terraform | HashiCorp Terraform is an open-source infrastructure-as-code tool that enables teams to define, provision, and manage cloud infrastructure using a declarative configuration lang... | 2 | developing |
| Scalr | Scalr is an enterprise-grade, drop-in replacement for Terraform Cloud and a remote Terraform operations backend that provides cost estimation, policy enforcement, and collaborat... | 4 | thin |
| Pulumi | Pulumi is a modern infrastructure as code platform that allows you to use familiar programming languages to build, deploy, and manage cloud infrastructure. The Pulumi Cloud REST... | 2 | thin |
| Spacelift | Spacelift is an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) orchestration platform that combines AI-assisted deployments, GitOps pipelines, and policy-as-code governance. It supports Terraform... | 1 | thin |
| Ansible | Ansible is an open-source IT automation platform developed by Red Hat that provides agentless configuration management, application deployment, cloud provisioning, and orchestra... | 4 | thin |
| Microsoft Bicep | Microsoft Bicep is a domain-specific language (DSL) that uses declarative syntax to deploy Azure resources. It provides a transparent abstraction over ARM templates and offers a... | 4 | thin |
| Puppet | Puppet provides infrastructure automation and configuration management for hybrid and cloud environments. Puppet Enterprise exposes a collection of service APIs (Orchestrator, R... | 9 | thin |
| Env0 | env0 is an infrastructure-as-code automation platform providing cost estimation, policy enforcement, and self-service environments for Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, CloudFormatio... | 1 | thin |
| Scalable Infrastructure | A subject-matter collection covering APIs, tools, and platforms for building and managing scalable cloud infrastructure. This topic encompasses compute, storage, networking, con... | 10 | thin |
Related areas
Tags: Configuration, DSL, Infrastructure as Code, Schemas, Serialization, Templating, YAML.
Sourced from the api-evangelist/configuration-language topic repo.