Using HCL in a Go application

HCL is itself written in Go and currently it is primarily intended for use as a library within other Go programs.

This section describes a number of different ways HCL can be used to define and process a configuration language within a Go program. For simple situations, HCL can decode directly into Go struct values in a similar way as encoding packages such as encoding/json and encoding/xml.

The HCL Go API also offers some alternative approaches however, for processing languages that may be more complex or that include portions whose expected structure cannot be determined until runtime.

The following sections give an overview of different ways HCL can be used in a Go program.

Sub-sections:

• Parsing HCL Input
• Diagnostic Messages
• Decoding Into Native Go Values
• Decoding With Dynamic Schema
• Expression Evaluation
• Advanced Decoding With The Low-level API
• Design Patterns for Complex Systems