Config Diff

What This Skill Does

The Config Diff skill provides a powerful, semantic-aware mechanism for comparing configuration files across various formats including YAML, JSON, TOML, INI, and .env files. Unlike standard text-based comparison tools which often report superficial differences caused by indentation, spacing, or key ordering, Config Diff parses the structure of your configuration files. It normalizes the data to identify actual functional changes, categorizing them as Added, Removed, Changed, or Unchanged. By utilizing structured path notation (e.g., db.connection.pool), the tool makes it easy to understand exactly how changes impact your application state. Furthermore, it integrates security best practices by automatically detecting and masking sensitive tokens, passwords, and API keys, ensuring you never accidentally expose secrets during a peer review or audit process. It also provides actionable merge strategies to help reconcile differences between development, staging, and production environments.

Installation

To install this skill, use the OpenClaw CLI in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/sa9saq/config-diff Ensure you have jq and yq installed on your system to enable the full breadth of semantic analysis features for JSON and YAML files.

Use Cases

• Environment Syncing: Quickly reconcile the differences between your config.dev.yml and config.prod.yml to identify missing environment variables.
• CI/CD Auditing: Automatically verify that secrets haven't been modified or accidentally exposed in configuration commits.
• Debugging Infrastructure: Troubleshoot configuration mismatches in complex deployments by comparing service-level INI or TOML settings across clusters.
• Dependency Updates: Compare updated configuration templates against your existing files to identify newly added features or deprecated keys.

Example Prompts

1. "Config Diff: compare ./config/app.json with ./config/app.prod.json and generate a table of differences."
2. "Show me what changed in the database section of my local .env file versus the production template, but make sure to hide all sensitive tokens."
3. "Analyze these two YAML files and suggest how to merge the staging values into the production config without losing critical production-specific settings."

Tips & Limitations

• Comment Sensitivity: Because this is a semantic tool, it ignores comments during analysis. If comments are critical to your documentation, refer to a standard text-based diff tool.
• Order Matters: While semantic diffs are generally order-agnostic, please note that for INI files, section order can sometimes influence application logic. Always verify critical sections manually if order is specified by your parser.
• Flattening: The tool uses dot notation for nesting. For deeply nested structures, ensure you are tracking the full path to avoid confusion.