validate - Validate Configuration

The validate command checks your Update-Watcher configuration file for correctness. It verifies YAML syntax, required fields, valid checker and notifier types, and option value types. This is useful after manually editing the config file or before deploying a new configuration to a server.

Usage

update-watcher validate

The validate command uses the same config file resolution as all other commands: it checks the --config flag first, then the default search paths (/etc/update-watcher/config.yaml, ~/.config/update-watcher/config.yaml, ./config.yaml).

What Is Validated

The validator checks the following:

YAML Syntax

The file must be valid YAML. Common syntax errors include incorrect indentation, missing colons, and unescaped special characters.

Required Fields

• The watchers section must exist and contain at least one watcher entry.
• Each watcher entry must have a type field.
• Notifier entries that require credentials (e.g., Slack webhook URL, Telegram bot token) are checked for the presence of those fields.

Valid Types

• Watcher type values must be one of the 14 supported checker types: apt, dnf, pacman, zypper, apk, macos, homebrew, snap, flatpak, docker, distro, openclaw, wordpress, webproject.
• Notifier type values must be one of the 16 supported notifier types.

Option Types

• Boolean options (like security_only, use_sudo) must be boolean values, not strings.
• String options (like webhook_url, path) must be strings.
• The send_policy setting must be either "only-on-updates" or "always".

Output

Valid Configuration

$ update-watcher validate
Configuration is valid.

Invalid Configuration

$ update-watcher validate
Configuration errors found:

  watchers[0]: unknown type "atp" (did you mean "apt"?)
  watchers[1].options.security_only: expected bool, got string "yes"
  notifiers[0].options: missing required field "webhook_url" for type "slack"

Each error message indicates the location in the config file and a description of the problem.

Examples

Validate the Default Config File

update-watcher validate

Validate a Specific Config File

update-watcher validate --config /path/to/config.yaml

Validate Before Deployment

A common pattern is to validate a config file before copying it to a production server:

update-watcher validate --config ./staging-config.yaml && \
  scp ./staging-config.yaml server:/etc/update-watcher/config.yaml

Validate in CI/CD

update-watcher validate --config ./config.yaml
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
  echo "Config validation failed"
  exit 1
fi

Exit Codes

Related

• status – View the resolved configuration.
• Configuration – Full YAML configuration reference.
• setup – Interactive wizard for creating valid configurations.