YAML Cheat Sheet

 

YAML or YML has become a must know data serialization language for System Administrators, it is widely used in many of the configuration management, containerization platforms , Orchestration applications, Infra as a Code, and many more, and because of it's human readable formats, it's widely accepted and used.

YAML usage in some widely used sysadmin tools.

• Ansible
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• AWS CloudFormation.
• TerraForm

Here in this blog post, i have kept some of the YAML cheat sheets, which can help you to craft your own or to read some yaml files.

Key Value

A variety of data is structured in the form of key value pairs.

Key - Items written on left side of data ( Fruit, Drink, Vegetable )

Value - Items written on left side of data ( Orange, Juice, Spinach)

Important: Space after :

YAML Key Value Pair

 
Fruit: Orange
Drink: Juice
Vegetable: Spinach

List or Array

A representation of List Smartphone type and Brand type in YAML format.

YAML List/Array

 
Smartphones:
  - IOS
  - Android

Brands:
  - Apple
  - Nokia
  - Micromax
  - Vivo
 

Dictionary

A representation of Employee named 26 year old male named as Jignesh working as Web developer data in dictionary type in YAML format.

YAML Dictionary/Map

 
Employee:
  Name: Jignesh
  Sex: Male
  Age: 26
  Title: Web Developer

Dictionary inside List

A representation of multiple list of Fruits (Mango, Guava, Banana) and their individual specification mapped in dictionary value ( Calories, Fat, Carbs )

YAML Dictionary inside List

 
Fruits:
  - Mango:
        Calories: 95
        Fat: 0.3
        Carbs: 25
  - Guava:
        Calories: 105
        Fat: 0.4
        Carbs: 27
  - Banana:
        Calories: 45
        Fat: 0.1
        Carbs: 11
Vegetables:
  - Onion:
        Calories: 25
        Fat: 0.1
        Carbs: 6
  - Potato:
        Calories: 22
        Fat: 0.2
        Carbs: 4.8
  - Ginger:
        Calories: 8
        Fat: 0.1
        Carbs: 1.9

List inside Dictionary

A representation of Employee named 26 year old male named as Jignesh working as Web developer data in dictionary type.

Employee Shail has been assigned two Projects ( Login and Logout Form ), a representation of List data.

YAML List inside Dictionary

 
Employee:
  Name: Shail
  Sex: Male
  Age: 28
  Title: Web Developer
  Projects:
    - Login Form
    - Logout Form

For sure there are many more to update in the YAML cheat list, but will begin with these..