Better yaml diffs

2023-01-25

I often find myself doing "yaml engineering" and a big part of it consists of diff-ing yaml files. Using a dyff, a custom diff tool aware of yaml semantics, is useful, especially when dealing with auto-generated files that are semantically identical but have textual differences (e.g. due to different field order).

I ran these commands to set dyff as the driver for yaml files in a specific repo:

1
git config --local diff.dyff.command 'dyff_between() { dyff --color on between --omit-header "$2" "$5"; }; dyff_between'
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echo '*.yaml diff=dyff' >> .git/info/attributes

The same config can be applied globally too with:

1
git config --global diff.dyff.command 'dyff_between() { dyff --color on between --omit-header "$2" "$5"; }; dyff_between'
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echo '*.yaml diff=dyff' >> $HOME/.config/git/attributes