jened

JenEd, stylized occasionally as JENED, is a lightweight, open‑source tool released in 2019 for automating the modification of configuration files in large software projects. The project was initiated by a group of developers at the University of Exeter who sought a more fine‑grained solution than standard text‑replacement approaches. By representing configuration files as structured trees internally, JenEd allows users to define modifications through a declarative JSON schema. These schemas can specify insertion, deletion, or transformation of nodes, making it suitable for environments with complex configurations such as Kubernetes manifests, Terraform templates, or cloud‑formation scripts.

The primary version control strategy for JenEd is Git, and the tool itself is written in Python 3.8+. It features a command‑line interface, a small library for direct integration into CI pipelines, and an optional REST API. Common use cases include automatically updating API endpoints, applying security hardening rules, or injecting corporate compliance tags. Its modular design permits plugin extensions; several community plugins exist for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud SDKs.

JenEd has been integrated into the CI/CD pipelines of several medium‑sized tech companies in 2020 and 2021, reporting noticeable reductions in manual configuration errors and in the time spent on release preparation. Despite its growing adoption, the project is maintained as an independent open‑source release on GitHub with an Apache License 2.0.