SNOW-1726409: Invalid/templated snowflake.yml file makes it impossible to run snow sql

[sfc-gh-rzukowski]

SnowCLI version

2.8.0

Python version

3.9.18

Platform

macOS-14.6.1-arm64-arm-64bit

What happened

When snowflake.yml cannot be parsed because of an error or env variable not set,
it is not possible to run snow sql because snowflake.yml must be read at the beginning.

This may not be a bug, but rather a design decision. I would expect that snow sql command is independent from a current project and it should not be using local files impllicitly to run, while snow app is the command that could use local project files.

If this is expected behaviour, I would suggest to give more descriptive error message saying explicitly that snowflake.yml cannot be read.

It is also worth considering an option to run sql query without touching files in local directory like snowflake.yml project file. The question is what the default should be.

Console output

% snow --config-file="./deployment/config.toml" sql -q "select 1"  --connection cd
╭─ Error ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ Could not find template variable ctx.env.PACKAGE_NAME                                                                                                                                                                     │
╰───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

How to reproduce

Include some template code in snowflake.yml file that requires variable to be set, for example

definition_version: 1.1
native_app:
  name: EXAPLE_APP
  source_stage: src.stage
  package:
    name: <% ctx.env.PACKAGE_NAME %>

and try to run simple query while snowflake.yml is in a current directory.