Episode

Understanding YAML

YAML

YAML (YAML Ain’t Markup Language (a recursive acronym), originally standing for Yet Another Markup Language) is a human-readable data-serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files and in applications where data is being stored or transmitted. CI systems’ modus operandi typically rely on YAML for configuration. We’ll cover, briefly, some of the native types involved and what the structure looks like.

Scalars

number-value: 42
floating-point-value: 3.141592
boolean-value: true # on, yes -- also work
# strings can be both 'single-quoted` and "double-quoted"
string-value: 'Bonjour'
python-version: "3.10"
unquoted-string: Hello World
hexadecimal: 0x12d4
scientific: 12.3015e+05
infinity: .inf
not-a-number: .NAN
null: ~
another-null: null
key with spaces: value
datetime: 2001-12-15T02:59:43.1Z
datetime_with_spaces: 2001-12-14 21:59:43.10 -5
date: 2002-12-14

Lists and Dictionaries

Elements of a list start with a “- " (a dash and a space) at the same indentation level.

jedis:
  - Yoda
  - Qui-Gon Jinn
  - Obi-Wan Kenobi
  - Luke Skywalker

Elements of a dictionary are in the form of “key: value” (the colon must be followed by a space).

jedi:
  name: Obi-Wan Kenobi
  home-planet: Stewjon
  species: human
  master: Qui-Gon Jinn
  height: 1.82m

Inline-Syntax

Since YAML is a superset of JSON, you can also write JSON-style maps and sequences.

episodes: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
best-jedi: {name: Obi-Wan, side: light}

Multiline Strings

In YAML, there are two different ways to handle multiline strings. This is useful, for example, when you have a long code block that you want to format in a pretty way, but don’t want to impact the functionality of the underlying CI script. In these cases, multiline strings can help. For an interactive demonstration, you can visit https://yaml-multiline.info/.

Put simply, you have two operators you can use to determine whether to keep newlines (|, exactly how you wrote it) or to remove newlines (>, fold them in). Similarly, you can also choose whether you want a single newline at the end of the multiline string, multiple newlines at the end (+), or no newlines at the end (-). The following is a summary of some variations:

folded_no_ending_newline:
  script:
    - >-
      echo "foo" &&
      echo "bar" &&
      echo "baz"


    - echo "do something else"

unfolded_ending_single_newline:
  script:
    - |
      echo "foo" && \
      echo "bar" && \
      echo "baz"


    - echo "do something else"

Nested

requests:
  # first item of `requests` list is just a string
  - http://example.com/

  # second item of `requests` list is a dictionary
  - url: http://example.com/
    method: GET

Comments

Comments begin with a pound sign (#) and continue for the rest of the line:

# This is a full line comment
foo: bar # this is a comment, too