Allow list-type parameters in Orbs | Feature Requests

Allow list-type parameters in Orbs

Dave Henderson

It'd be useful to allow handling lists of values for a parameter, without having to resort to workarounds like parsing comma-separated lists in

string

types.

I think it would be useful to be able to specify something like:

steps:
  - myorb/foo:
      bar:
        - baz
        - qux

And have the

myorb/foo

command called with a

bar

parameter equal to

[ "baz", "qux" ]

CCI-I-701

November 25, 2018

Minjun Seong

Hi folks! I'm a product manager at CircleCI. Would it be possible for you to:

Elaborate on your specific use case that led you to request for a list type parameter?
Provide an example on how are you currently working around this limitation?

This would greatly help me better understand the pain point, thank you!

kevin.kortum@trustedshops.com

Minjun Seong Sure :)

My most used scenario is for orbs. Consider the php orb at https://circleci.com/developer/orbs/orb/circleci/php

To install extensions, you will have to write the following YAML

      - php/install_php:
          version: "8.2"
          extensions: "php8.2-fpm,php8.2-phpdbg,php8.2-zip,php8.2-xml,php8.2-dom,php8.2-mbstring,php8.2-sockets,php8.2-gd,php8.2-soap,php8.2-curl,php8.2-intl,php8.2-mysql"

As you can see the extensions information gets quite convoluted. So having a list type would be nice in terms of readability. I'd also imagine it would be easier to iterate over so that you could potentially drop the "php8.2-" prefix in the example above.

I wrote another private orb for automating dependency installations. It uses an allow list to decided which dependencies can be updated. To make it work, i have to deal with a custom string and pattern matching instead of using a nice list, which would allow me to check if an item is part of it.

Consider

parameters:
  capabilities:
    description: "Comma-separated list of additional tools to set up. Use 'all' to install all known tools (default)."
    default: "all"
    type: string
steps:
  - checkout
  - when:
      condition:
        matches:
          value: << parameters.capabilities >>
          pattern: "(all|tool-a)"
      steps:
        - install_tool-a
  - when:
      condition:
        matches:
          value: << parameters.capabilities >>
          pattern: "(all|tool-b)"
      steps:
        - install_tool-b
  - when:
      condition:
        matches:
          value: << parameters.capabilities >>
          pattern: "(all|tool-c)"
      steps:
        - install_tool-c

The list version would look probably like this

# ...
  - when:
      condition:
          or: [ "tool-a" in << parameters.capabilities >>, "all" in << parameters.capabilities >>]
      steps:
        - install_tool-a

The actual condition would depend on the implementation, but i think someone could come up with a clever way to do it.

kevin.kortum@trustedshops.com

Push for an update. Why does this ideas page even exist when this is not even recognized?

Tal Marcovich

Is there any update on this? This is a feature request from 2018...

Nelson, Pete

My use case is i want the ability to bake my caching logic into my install dependencies command. But I have no way of passing the

paths

parameter to my command until you add list type. This is bothersome I have no way to do this

James Nail

Nelson, Pete this is exactly my use case as well!

Rob Duncan

Any updates on this? Not being able to create a basic yaml structure list like this feels so inadequate in 2023.

Jeff Valore

I ran into this limitation trying to set up standard workflows for installing dependencies then caching them (i.e. run

yarn install

then save_cache the downloaded files) but since you can't take in a List, you can't pass customizable paths through your own command to

save_cache

We are approaching 5 years and this unfortunately still doesn't exist. CircleCI could have been so good, but necessary functionality like this is never added (I've given up on so many CI plans due to the CircleCI limitations). Passing Lists must already exist in some form because

save_cache

can take a "List".

Jonas steinberg

Still needed. Folks iterating in templates is an old thing, e.g. xml, erb, ego, helm. I think we just need to get over it and do it here because not having a parameter of type list is fairly comical at this point and probably something that all other CIs do.

Diógenes Fernandes Hermínio

What is the current workaround for that?

gleb.stsenov@gmail.com

it also needs some helpers around it - at least for-loop and concatenation.

Wish CircleCI could opensource this part..

Steve Lewis

Similar to many below, I just ran into this in trying to template our usage of persist_to_workspace paths for a private orb.

FWIW - I believe this wouldn't need any looping construct to be valuable in many contexts.

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