V0.12 native support for HCL to JSON conversion

Terraform
1

Hi,

The article says that there is native support coming for hcl to json conversion in v0.12. Do we have any update post Aug 2018

2

Hi @Rajeevm2019,

That article is incorrect (or rather, outdated). There are no current plans to produce a tool for converting between HCL and JSON.

Such a conversion should not be necessary, because Terraform already directly supports both formats and allows you to mix them in a single configuration so that you can have human-authored files in native syntax alongside machine-generated files in JSON syntax.

To distinguish between native syntax and JSON syntax, use the .tf suffix for native syntax files and .tf.json for JSON syntax files.

3

Just noting that while a conversion tool might not be necessary for providing configuration to Terraform, it would be super helpful for parsing HCL with other tools. If there was a native way to convert HCL to JSON, other tools could read the configuration easily without having to implement their own HCL parser.

3 Likes
4

Agreed, it would save devs an enormous amount of time to have a parser for other languages that could reliably parse HCL directly or via json