Recently I was involved in a housekeeping task where we had to update versions of some dependencies in 80+ services and I came across a pretty cool way to achieve that using Vim idioms.
I already use Vim macros a lot on the daily basis but this was my first time I used them in conjuction with the :args and felt it’s worth sharing.
First, let’s understand the mentioned terms.
Vim Macros
In Vim, the word “macro” may refer to:
A sequence of commands recorded to a register
Arg list
Args list is a set of files you specify before you run a command on those files. Unlike buffer list which is a list of all open files, in the Arg list files can be selectively added.
Writing the Macro
So the macro which I needed to write for my task was:
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<Esc> // enter normal mode
qa // start recording macro in register "a"
:%s/2022/2023 // update copyright header
:%s/v0.7.9/v0.8.0 // update version
:%s/perms\/v0.9.0/perms\/1.0.0 // another module update
q // stop recording.
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Now in order to run this macro in all .tf files, let’s load them in the arglist.
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:args **/.tf // load .tf file to the argslist
:args // view arglist
:argdo norm @a // run macro stored in register "a" on all files in the arglist
:argdo update // save all changes
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Once it’s done, time to view our git diff.
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$ git status
...
...
index 83ba5f1..47ea517 100644
--- a/main.tf
+++ b/main.tf
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-/* Copyright (C) 2022 FooBar - All Rights Reserved
+/* Copyright (C) 2023 FooBar - All Rights Reserved
@@ -8,9 +8,9 @@
*/
module "foo" {
- source = "git::https://example.com/vpc.git?ref=refs/heads/branch-name?ref=v0.7.9"
+ source = "git::https://example.com/vpc.git?ref=refs/heads/branch-name?ref=v0.8.0"
}
module "bar" {
- source = "git::https://example.com/vpc.git?ref=refs/heads/branch-name?ref=perms/v0.9.0¨
+ source = "git::https://example.com/vpc.git?ref=refs/heads/branch-name?ref=perms/v1.0.0¨
}
...
...
--- a/gke/main.tf
+++ b/gke/main.tf
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-/* Copyright (C) 2022 FooBar - All Rights Reserved
+/* Copyright (C) 2023 FooBar - All Rights Reserved
@@ -8,9 +8,9 @@
*/
module "foo" {
- source = "git::https://example.com/vpc.git?ref=refs/heads/branch-name?ref=v0.7.9"
+ source = "git::https://example.com/vpc.git?ref=refs/heads/branch-name?ref=v0.8.0"
}
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Voila!, it worked 🙌
P.S.
Like everything else there are N number of ways to achieve what I just did with the combination of :args and Macros but this was my TIL moment, I really like the potential of it and felt worth sharing it.
–
Ciao