Huge yaml files are impossible to understand, so let's split them up!

yshard is a CLI that takes a single YAML file as input and splits it into separate files, doing a GROUP BY on the user-provided JSON path. It is particularly useful in cases where large complex packages are distributed as a single YAML file, containing multiple YAML documents - as is often the case for Kubernetes manifests. yshard is also useful when you render your own templates into a single output file.

Grab the binary for your architecture from the releases page

Get a YAML file you want to split up, for example:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/argoproj/argo-workflows/stable/manifests/install.yaml

Now use yshard to split the YAML, in this case we split by the kind field of each document, putting documents with the same kind in the same file in output-directory:

cat install | yshard -g ".kind" -o output-directory

Then in the output directory you see:

$ ls output-directory
ClusterRole.yml              ConfigMap.yml                Deployment.yml               RoleBinding.yml              ServiceAccount.yml
ClusterRoleBinding.yml       CustomResourceDefinition.yml Role.yml                     Service.yml                  __ungrouped__.yml