TIL: You can use Use `yq` to Mass Edit Markdown Files

TIL you can use yq to mass edit markdown files

yq is a tool similar to jq except it allows you to edit, JSON, XML and YAML. It has a very similar syntax to parse and edit files as jq does.

I was recently adding new open graph images to all of my blog posts. After creating these images and storing them next to the post, where the structure looks like:

content/posts/2020-01-13-using-tox-with-a-makefile-to-automate-python-related-tasks/
├── images
│   └── cover.png
└── index.md

Now I needed to add the following to my frontmatter for all of my posts so from this

---
title: "TIL: You can use Use `yq` to Mass Edit Markdown Files"
---

to this:

---
title: "TIL: You can use Use `yq` to Mass Edit Markdown Files"
cover:
  image: images/cover.png
---

If I wanted to edit just that single post we could do something like this:

yq --front-matter="process" -i '.cover.image = "images/cover.png"' content/posts/2020-01-13-using-tox-with-a-makefile-to-automate-python-related-tasks/index.md

Now I have ~50 odd posts I need to edit I don’t want to run this command manually for each 😨. Nobody wants to do that, so instead, we can run the following:

find -name  "index.md" -exec yq --front-matter="process" -i '.cover.image = "images/cover.png"' {} \;

# Or using fd a find alternative

fd "index.md" -x yq --front-matter="process" -i '.cover.image = "images/cover.png"'

That’s it, we just added a cover image to the frontmatter in all of our posts 😊.

Appendix¶

Appendix