hashicorp/hcl

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

5823 stars · 670 forks observed · 2026-10-16

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) is a Go toolkit for building structured, human- and machine-friendly configuration languages, used by tools like Terraform. It provides a native syntax plus a JSON-based variant, with parsing, validation, and expression evaluation APIs.

Use cases

• parse HCL configuration files in Go
• build a custom configuration language for a CLI tool
• decode config files into Go structs
• convert between HCL and JSON configuration
• evaluate expressions and variables in config files

When to choose

• building devops or server tooling that needs a structured config format
• you want human-friendly config syntax with machine-readable JSON equivalent
• you need programmatic parsing and validation of Terraform-style files

When to avoid

• you just need generic data serialization like JSON or YAML
• your project is not in Go or not using Go Modules (for HCL v2)
• you need a full programming language for configuration logic

Facets

library · maturity stable

parser serialization configuration-management developer-tools developer-tools infrastructure-as-code go cross-platform configuration-language hashicorp hcl terraform -variant devops configuration

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