add -json and -t options to inspection related cmds

[noahehall]

Proposal

• having -json output for inspection cmds (e.g. nomad server members) would be awesome
• e.g. nomad node status -verbose -json can be piped to jq and drilled down to retrieve info,
  • but many cmds dont have the -json option

Use-cases

• support scripting and automation without resorting to awk/sed

List of commands missing flags

• nomad acl token update (refer to Add -json and -t flag for nomad acl token create command #16055 for an example implementation)
• nomad acl token self (refer to Add -json and -t flag for nomad acl token create command #16055 for an example implementation)
• nomad acl token info (refer to Add -json and -t flag for nomad acl token create command #16055 for an example implementation)
• nomad acl policy info
• nomad job status (would likely make nomad job inspect redundant)
• nomad job scaling-events
• nomad operator autopilot get-config
• nomad operator gossip keyring list
• nomad operator raft list-peers
• nomad operator snapshot inspect

The following commands require a Nomad license, and it may not be possible to work on them without one.

• nomad license get
• nomad sentinel list
• nomad sentinel read

The following commands are unusual in the sense they are not backed by a Go struct, so a JSON output would need to be created manually.

• nomad alloc fs (file stat and directory output)
• nomad operator raft info

[jrasell]

Hi @noahehall and thanks for raising this. I agree and think this would be really useful, and therefore will add it to our backlog.

[dttung2905]

Hi @jrasell , do you have a list of nomad cli command that we want to add -json flag? I can help out on this if you don't mind

[jrasell]

Hi @dttung2905, that sounds great. I have used grep -L "\-json" --exclude="*_test.go" --exclude="*_delete.go" command/*.go to get a better view of the files that could be suitable for adding the -json and t flags. All those listed, however, would not be suitable.

Those that seem like good initial candidates would be:

• command/alloc_checks.go
• command/namespace_status.go
• command/quota_inspect.go
• command/quota_status.go
• command/sentinel_list.go
• command/sentinel_read.go
• command/server_members.go
• command/sentinel_list.go
• command/sentinel_read.go

Please let me know if you have any questions or thoughts.

[lgfa29]

I closed some issues that were related to this one. The commands mentioned in them were:

• nomad acl token create
• nomad node status
• nomad alloc status

[jrasell]

Just wanted to post an update of some internal progress that has been made internally over the past few weeks. The following PR's have been raised to add -json and -t flags to the CLI where missing:

• cli: add -json and -t flag for alloc checks command  #16405
• cli: Add -json and -t flags to namespace status command #16442
• cli: Add json and -t flags to server members command #16444
• Add -json flag to quota inspect command #16478
• cli: add -json and -t flags to quota status command #16485

Thanks to @Juanadelacuesta for this work!

[noahehall]

@Juanadelacuesta excellent work!

[BBBmau]

I'm interested in contributing to Nomad, are there any other commands that could use the -json and -t flags?

I saw that acl token create is one that could use it but it seems like acl token list already accomplishes this with the flags already included.

[lgfa29]

Hi @BBBmau 👋

That's awesome that you're interested in contributing to Nomad! I think any info, status, list command should have a -json and -t flag.

For create and apply commands, as the example you mentioned, it would be helpful to have these flags when the output has the generated resource, and so you can pipe its output to something else. For example, it would allow you to do something like this:

$ nomad acl token create | jq -r '.SecretID' > secret_token.txt

(for consistency, all create and apply should probably have these flags, but that's likely a bigger scope, specially since some apply commands already have a -json flag to change input parsing, but I digress 😅 )

#16055 already added these flags to acl token create but I updated the issue body with a more exhaustive list of commands still missing them. Feel free to pick anyone of them to work next and let us know if you need any help 🙂