// Generated by conforma CLI documentation tooling. DO NOT EDIT.
= ec compare

Compare two Conforma Policy specs for equivalence

== Synopsis

Compare two Conforma Policy specs to determine if they would
produce the same evaluation result for a given image at a specific time.

The comparison is based on:
- Policy and data source URIs (treated as sets)
- RuleData content (canonicalized JSON comparison)
- Include/exclude matchers (normalized and deduplicated)
- Active volatile configuration (filtered by effective time and image matching)
- Global configuration merging

Examples:
  # Compare two policy files
  ec compare policy1.yaml policy2.yaml

  # Compare with specific effective time
  ec compare policy1.yaml policy2.yaml --effective-time "2024-01-15T12:00:00Z"

  # Compare with image information for volatile config matching
  ec compare policy1.yaml policy2.yaml --image-digest "sha256:abc123" --image-ref "registry.redhat.io/ubi8/ubi:latest"

  # Compare with JSON output
  ec compare policy1.yaml policy2.yaml --output json
[source,shell]
----
ec compare <policy1> <policy2> [flags]
----
== Options

--allow-past-effective-time:: Allow setting --effective-time to a date in the past. By default, dates in the past are rejected. (Default: false)
--effective-time:: Effective time for policy evaluation ('now' for current time, 'attestation' for time from the youngest attestation, or RFC3339 format, e.g. 2022-11-18T00:00:00Z) (Default: now)
-h, --help:: help for compare (Default: false)
--image-digest:: Image digest for volatile config matching
--image-ref:: Image reference for volatile config matching
--image-url:: Image URL for volatile config matching
--output:: Output format (text, json) (Default: text)

== Options inherited from parent commands

--debug:: same as verbose but also show function names and line numbers (Default: false)
--kubeconfig:: path to the Kubernetes config file to use
--logfile:: file to write the logging output. If not specified logging output will be written to stderr
--quiet:: less verbose output (Default: false)
--retry-duration:: base duration for exponential backoff calculation (Default: 1s)
--retry-factor:: exponential backoff multiplier (Default: 2)
--retry-jitter:: randomness factor for backoff calculation (0.0-1.0) (Default: 0.1)
--retry-max-retry:: maximum number of retry attempts (Default: 3)
--retry-max-wait:: maximum wait time between retries (Default: 3s)
--timeout:: max overall execution duration (Default: 5m0s)
--trace:: enable trace logging, set one or more comma separated values: none,all,perf,cpu,mem,opa,log (Default: none)
--verbose:: more verbose output (Default: false)

== See also

 * xref:ec.adoc[ec - Conforma CLI]
