As a data format, yaml is extremely complicated and it has many footguns. In this post I explain some of those pitfalls by means of an example, and I suggest a few simpler and safer yaml alternatives.

A 10 minute read covering some YAML edge-cases that you should have in mind when writing complex YAML files

  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    29·
    4 days ago

    Man, even knowing that YAML document was going to be laden with bullshit, I only spotted the unquoted version strings looking fishy.

    I also really dislike how often YAML is abused to take keys as list items. Something like this, for example:

    hosts:
  debian-vm:
    user: root
  database-server:
    user: sql

    “debian-vm” and “database-server” are the hostname, and as such they are values. So, this should be written as:

    hosts:
  - name: debian-vm
    user: root
  - name: database-server
    user: sql

    And I’m not just nitpicking here. If we change the example a bit:

    hosts:
  database:
    user: sql

    …then suddenly, you don’t know, if “database” is just one of many possible hosts or if all hosts always have a shared database with this technology.