Back to: YAML
YAML (short for “YAML Ain’t Markup Language”) or YML is a human-readable data serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files and data exchange between programming languages. YAML files have the extension “.yml” or “.yaml”.
One of the main advantages of YAML is its simplicity and readability. It uses indentation and whitespace to structure data, which makes it easy to understand and modify. This is in contrast to other serialization formats like XML and JSON, which use a lot of tags and brackets.
YAML is also very flexible. It can represent complex data structures like arrays, hashes, and nested objects, as well as basic data types like strings, integers, and booleans. Additionally, YAML supports comments, which makes it easy to document code and explain how data is structured.
Another advantage of YAML is its portability. Because YAML is a text-based format, it can be read and written by any programming language. This makes it easy to use YAML files across different systems and platforms.
YAML has become a popular choice for configuration files, especially in web development. Many web frameworks and tools, such as Ruby on Rails, use YAML for their configuration files. Additionally, popular tools like Docker and Kubernetes use YAML for their deployment files.