A small yaml cheat sheet - Mon, Mar 28, 2022

A small yaml cheat sheet

Knowing the basic of Yaml as a software engineer has got more important throughout the last years because of its widespread usage for deployment definitions and CI/CD configurations.
Since I always stumble above the same syntactically stumbling block, I decide to make a small cheat sheet with some Yaml basics and oddities (you might be surprised what is valid yaml):

# Mappings
key: "This is the value"

# Nested mappings
Chihuahua:
  size: small
  color: brown
Border Collie: {size: medium, color: black and white}

# Arrays / Collections / Lists (different syntaxes):
birds:
   - Starling
   - Sparrow
fish: [Catfish, Cod]
dogs:
  - 
    Poodle
  - 
    Beagle
dinosaurs: []
cats: 
  - 
    Ragdoll
  - 
                                            Persian
 
# Collection of nested mappings
# The values in a list do not have to be the same type
animals:
  - birds:
      Starling: black
      Sparrow: brown
  - dogs:
      Dalmatian: dotted

# Strings
my-normal-string: this is not a normal string

# Escape sequences need double quotes:
my-escaped-string: "this is not a normal string\n"

# Multi line with new lines:
first-quote: >
  Tell me and I forget.
  Teach me and I remember.
  Involve me
  and I learn
    
# Multi line without new lines:
second-quote: |
  Tell me and I forget.
  Teach me and I remember.
  Involve me
  and I learn  

# Multi line without trailing spaces new lines (The "-" strips the last character):
third-quote: |-
  Tell me and I forget.
  Teach me and I remember.
  Involve me
  and I learn
     
# Comments:
# This is a full line comment
commented-key: "This is the value" # This is a comment too

Fell free to paste the content above in the yaml linter or the json converter . Both should produce valid output.

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