Setting Up Your Editor for Nomad Job Specifications

For formatting HCLv2 files (that Nomad job spec uses), you can use the following setup to neatly format them automatically.

VSCode#

• Install this extension.
• Add the following lines to your settings.json:

    "files.associations": {
        "*.nomad": "hcl",
        "*.nomad.tpl": "hcl",
        "*.tf": "terraform",
    }

• Reload VSCode.

Manual#

• Install hclfmt using go (they don’t provide pre-compiled binaries, so building from source is only option):

go install github.com/hashicorp/hcl/v2/cmd/hclfmt@latest

• Format with hclfmt. Since it only works on a single file by default, we need to use a wrapper script to cover all files and nested directories.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -e
for file in *; do
  hclfmt -w $file
done

• Save the above as run-hclfmt in /usr/local/bin and chmod +x /usr/local/bin/run-hclfmt

• Now, you’ll be able to run this script from anywhere in your directory of Nomad job specs using run-hclfmt. It includes sub directories as well.