Tips & Tricks

YAML anchors

If you want to re-use a part of your configuration, you can create a snippet:

# Everything starting with "x-" on toplevel will be ignored.
x-default-access: &default-access
  access:
    - group1
    - group2
    - group3

# Use it: 
secrets:
  - path: foo.txt
    <<: *default-access
  - path: bar.txt
    <<: *default-access

For less often-used snippets it is sometimes useful to just reference another part directly:

secrets:
  - path: foo.txt
    access: &default-access
      - group1
      - group2
      - group3
  - path: bar.txt
    <<: *default-access

Read up on YAML anchors for more background.

Git integration

Unlike most other tools, sesam integrates more with git to show you diffs and record a consistent state on checkouts.

Diffing

On init, we've setup diff filters via the .gitattributes file. This means that git will pipe every change through sesam reveal before showing as diff.

git diff HEAD^ should therefore just work out of the box and show you locally what was changed.

Checkout

Something similar happens on checkout with smudge filters. When you check out an older state with git we automatically reveal a fitting state. Files you do not have access to are left out though.

Audit log

sesam is based on a log that keeps track of all modifications made in the repository. It can be useful to view it, if you're unsure on what happened:

$ sesam log

Config linting

This will check your config for validity and report any issue:

$ sesam lint

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