Overview of the YAML language

YAML, an acronym for YAML Ain't Markup Language, is a human-readable scripting language used for data serialization and normally used for handling configurations definitions for applications. It can be considered a superset of JSON.

YAML uses indentation for handling the structure of the object's definitions, and it's insensitive to quotation marks and braces. It's simply a data representation language and is not used for executing commands.

With Azure DevOps, YAML is extremely important because it allows you to define a pipeline by using a script definition instead of a graphical interface (that cannot be ported between projects).

The official YAML website can be found here:

http://yaml.org/

A YAML structure is based on key-value elements:

Key: Value # This is a comment

In the following sections, we'll learn how to define objects in YAML.

Scalars

As an example, the following are scalar variables...