SAsaikatsg·Dec 25, 2024Submission
Simple, lightweight, extensible, configuration management library for Go
1 points · Open discussionknadh
koanf
Go2019–2024
knadh / koanf
koanf
Simple, extremely lightweight, extensible, configuration management library for Go. Supports JSON, TOML, YAML, env, command line, file, S3 etc. Alternative to viper.
3Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
4.2KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Simple, extremely lightweight, extensible, configuration management library for Go. Supports JSON, TOML, YAML, env, command line, file, S3 etc. Alternative to viper.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year4 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-06-19 04:19:30 UTC to 2024-12-25 07:54:24 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcesSeems quite useful. Will definitely check it out.
Minor nit: 10MB really isn’t that “small” for a CLI. I’d looked at your go.mod and seems like the most of dependency bloat might be coming from cobra or viper as it has in-tree plugins. You can check out an alternative like https://github.com/knadh/koanf which would decrease the binary size, I’m sure.
In PuckUse viper with care. It has some dangerous fundamental flaws [1]. We got bitten hard, submitted a PR [2] and followed up for a year and a half to no avail, before I went ahead and reinvented the wheel and wrote koanf (plug), specifically to avoid viper's flaws.
Most importantly:
- Breaks JSON, YAML, TOML etc. language specs by forcibly lowercasing all keys internally. Dangerous because it can silently merge differently cased config keys into lowercase.
- Hard codes big unnecessary dependencies into the core, significantly bloating build sizes. No separation or abstraction.
[1] https://github.com/spf13/viper/pull/635
[2] https://github.com/knadh/koanf#alternative-to-viper
In Viper – Go Configuration with FangsShow HN: Koanf – A Go package for reading config
2 points · Open discussion