yaml

One thing that was not obvious when I was setting up GitHub Actions on the Ansible Kubernetes Collection repository was how to have a 'CI' workflow run both on pull requests and on a schedule. I like to have scheduled runs for most of my projects, so I can see if something starts failing because an underlying dependency changes and breaks my tests.

The documentation for on.schedule just has an example with the workflow running on a schedule. For example:

Separately, there's documentation for triggering a workflow on events like a 'push' or a 'pull_request':

I have been working on an infrastructure project that uses YAML files for all inventory and configuration management, and for the most part, if you're using tools like Ansible, CloudFormation, etc., then you don't ever have to worry about the actual parsing of a YAML file, and keys and values in the file are readily accessible since these tools parse them and get them into a readable structure for you.

But there's often little bits of glue code, or infrastructure build/cleanup jobs, where you need to grab one specific value out of a YAML file, and all you have readily available is bash. Luckily for me, I also have Ruby available in the particular environment where I needed to parse the YAML file, so doing this was as easy as:

1. Defining a little bit of Ruby code which would load the YAML file, then grab a value out of it.
2. Running that Ruby code using ruby -e (-e for 'evaluate this code), operating on the contents of a YAML file.

And here's how that looked, in my case:

I recently had to build an Ansible playbook that takes in a massive inventory structure (read from a YAML file), modifies a specific key in that file, then dumps the file back to disk. There are some other ways that may be more efficient standalone (e.g. using a separate Python/PHP/Ruby/etc. script and a good YAML library), but since I had to do a number of other things in this Ansible playbook, I thought it would keep it simple if I could also modify the key inside the playbook.

I was scratching my head for a while, because while I knew that I could use the dict | combine() filter to merge two dicts together (this is a feature that was introduced in Ansible 2.0), I hadn't done so for a deeply-nested dict.

Travis CI's documentation often mentions the fact that it can call out to shell scripts in your repository, and recommends anything more complicated than a command or two (maybe including a pipe or something) be placed in a separate shell script.

But there are times when it's a lot more convenient to just keep the Travis CI-specific logic inside my repositories' .travis.yml file.

As it turns out, YAML is well-suited to, basically, inlining shell scripts. YAML's literal scalar indicator (a pipe, or |) allows you to indicate a block of content where newlines should be preserved, though whitespace before and after the line will be trimmed.

So if you have a statement like:

You can represent that in YAML via:

As someone who loves YAML syntax (so much more pleasant to work with than JSON!), I wanted to jot down a few notes about syntax formatting for the benefit of Drupal 8 developers everywhere.

I often see copy/pasted YAML examples like the following:

This is perfectly valid YAML. And technically any JSON is valid YAML too. That's part of what makes YAML so powerful—it's easy to translate between JSON and YAML, but YAML is way more readable!

So instead of using YAML like that, you can make the structure and relationships so much more apparent by formatting it like so: