pandoc-k9

Pandoc custom reader and writer for K9 Nickel self-validating components (.k9.ncl files) — converts between the K9 format and Pandoc’s AST for documentation generation.

Table of Contents

• Overview
• K9 Security Levels
• Usage
• Related
• License

Overview

K9 components are Nickel configuration files with a specific schema: metadata (name, version, description, author, trust_level), a security profile (three permission flags), and optional lifecycle recipes (install, validate, deploy, migrate, rollback).

pandoc-k9 provides two cooperating Lua files:

• k9-reader.lua — Pandoc custom reader that parses a .k9.ncl file into a Pandoc AST (header, metadata table, security profile section, recipe code blocks, raw source appendix). Produces HTML, Markdown, PDF, or any format Pandoc supports.

• k9-writer.lua — Reverses the process: walks a Pandoc AST and emits a syntactically valid .k9.ncl file the K9 toolchain can evaluate.

K9 Security Levels

Level	Capability
'Kennel	Data-only. No execution. Strict sandbox. Safe to parse anywhere.
'Yard	Nickel evaluation + limited I/O. Capability-based sandbox.
'Hunt	Full shell execution via recipes. Cryptographic signature required.

Usage

# K9 → HTML documentation
pandoc -f k9-reader.lua component.k9.ncl -o docs.html

# K9 → Markdown
pandoc -f k9-reader.lua component.k9.ncl -t markdown

# Round-trip: K9 → Pandoc AST → K9
pandoc -f k9-reader.lua input.k9.ncl -t k9-writer.lua -o roundtrip.k9.ncl

Related

• k9-showcase — K9 component showcase

• Nickel — configuration language used by K9

• Pandoc custom readers

License

PMPL-1.0-or-later. See LICENSE.