niet

What it is and what it does

Niet is a shell-friendly command-line tool for reading and querying YAML, JSON, and TOML files. It uses jmespath-style path expressions to extract nested values and supports multiple output formats (JSON, YAML, TOML, eval-safe strings, quoted variants, and delimited lists). You can pipe data from stdin, read from local files, or fetch from web URLs, making it useful for CI pipelines and shell scripts that need to parse configuration or data files without writing custom parsing code.

The tool is designed as a shell equivalent to jq or xmllint but for structured data formats. It can extract single values, filter lists, convert between formats, and output results in formats suitable for shell eval or environment variable assignment. Dependencies are minimal (jmespath, pytoml, pyyaml) and it installs as a pure Python wheel with low friction.

Use it for:

• Extract configuration values from YAML or JSON files in CI/CD pipelines and assign them to shell variables.
• Convert YAML configuration to JSON or TOML for use by tools that expect a different format.
• Query nested data structures from stdin in shell one-liners without writing custom parsing scripts.
• Filter and extract list elements from config files with output formatted for shell eval or IFS-based processing.
• Read and parse remote configuration files from web URLs directly in shell scripts.

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

A command-line tool that extracts and transforms data from YAML, JSON, and TOML files using path expressions, with support for format conversion and shell integration.

No. While niet is low-friction to install and has no known vulnerabilities, it is abandoned with no maintenance or security updates forthcoming. For active projects, consider maintained alternatives; for existing scripts already using niet, it remains functional but carries the risk of unpatched issues.

Install

niet on PyPI

pip install niet

uv add niet

poetry add niet

Installing niet

Before you install

Low install friction with a pure Python wheel and three lightweight dependencies (jmespath, pytoml, pyyaml). However, the package is abandoned—last release was 2023-04-21, so no maintenance or security updates are forthcoming.

License in practice

MIT license is permissive, allowing use in commercial and open-source projects with minimal restrictions; you must include a copy of the license and copyright notice.

Quickstart

pip install niet

echo '{"project": {"name": "my-app"}}' | niet project.name
# Output: my-app

niet project.name /path/to/file.json

Requires Python 3.9 or higher.

Verify before relying

• Whether jmespath expression support is complete or has known limitations beyond what the description states.
• Whether web resource reading (mentioned in description) is fully functional or has known issues.
• Current status of any open issues or pull requests in the repository.

Package facts

Evidence: niet-3.2.0-py3-none-any.whl

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