Porter explain to display custom section when output is JSON

[StrayDogge]

Automating porter installations would greatly benefit of having this feature. An automation system will have additional requirements that the custom section data in the Porter manifest can satisfy. However, at the moment it is very difficult to extract the information.

It is undestandable that the format porter explain command produces by default is not suited to manage arbitrary custom section data. However, when using --output json flag this is certainly possible since the data ends up in JSON format in the generated bundle.json file anyways.

So, given the following custom section in porter.yaml:

custom:
  dependencies:
    bundles:
      - name: "bundle-one"
        version: 0.1.0
      - name: "bundle-two"
        version: 0.2.0
        outputs:
          - "output1"
          - "output2"

Note: I am aware of the dependency management supported by Porter, but we may not always want the install action to invoke the dependency installation. Just consider any custom data - don't get hung up on the sample.

What I would hope to find in the output of porter explain --output json is:

{
  "dependencies": {
    "bundles": [
      {
        "name": "bundle-one",
        "version": "0.1.0"
      },
      {
        "name": "bundle-two",
        "outputs": [
          "output1",
          "output2"
        ],
        "version": "0.2.0"
      }
    ]
  }
}

I have managed to create a suboptimal workaround by creating a custom action that will format the custom section into JSON, but the action invocation requires an existing installation of the bundle, which is not acceptable in my case. Extracting the bundle.json file from image is another option, but again, having porter explain do the work would be best.