Input Formats

decoct accepts infrastructure configuration in YAML, JSON, and INI formats. Everything is normalised internally to ruamel.yaml round-trip types before the compression pipeline runs. Output is always YAML.

YAML

YAML is the native format. Files are loaded with round-trip parsing, preserving comments, key ordering, and flow style through the pipeline until a pass explicitly removes them.

Detail	Value
Extensions	.yaml, .yml
Comment handling	Preserved until strip-comments runs
Multi-document	Single document per file

When reading from stdin, decoct always treats input as YAML.

JSON

JSON files are auto-detected by the .json extension and converted to round-trip types internally:

• dict becomes CommentedMap
• list becomes CommentedSeq
• Scalars (int, float, bool, None) pass through unchanged

Detail	Value
Extension	.json
Output format	YAML

JSON input effectively undergoes a JSON-to-YAML conversion as part of compression. Works well with Terraform state files, cloud provider API responses, and other JSON-based infrastructure data.

INI / Key-Value Files

decoct handles INI-style and flat key=value configuration files, detected by extension.

Detail	Value
Extensions	.ini, .conf, .cfg, .cnf, .properties

Two parsing modes

The parser inspects the raw text for [section] headers:

Sectioned INI (files with [section] headers):

• Parsed with Python’s configparser
• Produces a nested structure: each section maps to its keys and values

Flat key=value (no section headers):

• Parsed line-by-line
• Lines starting with # or ; are comments (skipped)
• Produces a flat key-value structure

Value type coercion

All INI values start as strings. decoct converts them to native types:

Input string	Resulting type
true, yes, on	True (bool)
false, no, off	False (bool)
Valid integer (e.g. 8080)	int
Valid float (e.g. 3.14)	float
Everything else	str

Example

Given a my.cnf MySQL configuration:

[mysqld]
port = 3306
max_connections = 151
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 128M

[client]
port = 3306
socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock

decoct compress my.cnf --schema mariadb-mysql --stats

Output:

mysqld:
  innodb_buffer_pool_size: 128M
client:
  socket: /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock

Default values (port: 3306, max_connections: 151) are stripped by the schema.

Format Auto-Detection

Format is determined by file extension:

Extension	Detected format
.json	JSON
.ini, .conf, .cfg, .cnf, .properties	INI
.yaml, .yml, everything else	YAML

Platform Auto-Detection

When --schema is not provided, decoct examines the parsed document content to guess the platform and load the matching bundled schema. Eight platforms are auto-detected:

Platform	Detection rule
Docker Compose	Has services key with a dict value
Kubernetes	Has apiVersion and kind keys
Ansible Playbook	List where first item has hosts and tasks/roles
cloud-init	2+ keys from packages, runcmd, write_files, users, etc.
Terraform State	Has terraform_version and resources keys
GitHub Actions	Has on and jobs keys
Traefik	Has entryPoints, or providers with api/log
Prometheus	Has scrape_configs key

For all other platforms, pass --schema <name> explicitly.

Limitations

• XML is not yet supported
• INI comments are discarded during parsing
• Flat key=value does not support multi-line values
• stdin is always treated as YAML