YAML, The grimoire of a modern Linux professional

Python enables you to easily serialize objects as either JSON or YAML: very often it is very convenient to leverage on these features exploiting them to enhance your own object. YAML serialization comes almost for free if you derive your classes from the YAML object, whereas automatic instantiation of objects from a YAML document requires a little bit of work and leverages on YAML tags. As for JSON serialization, it is bloody useful and enables you to quickly and easily serialize the contents of your objects into JSON documents that can be exploited for example to interact with or to develop a REST API.

This post, Python Serialization as JSON or YAML exploiting YAML TAGS, shows you how to develop a Python package that provides such kinds of objects. As usual we take particularly care of the code style, using a very clean and portable design and adhering best practices.

The operating environment used in this post is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 or Rocky Linux 9 - using a different environment may lead to having to adapt or even change things.

YAML is a must-have skill for IT professionals, since it is probably becoming the the most commonly used document format for manifest and configuration files - think for example to Kubernetes, Ansible and a lot of other modern Dev-Ops oriented or CI/CD tools such as drone.

Being skilled on YAML does not only mean being able to write YAML documents, but also efficiently query and manipulate YAML files.

This post provides everything it is very likely you must know to exploit YAML in your daily work, explaining its syntax and showing things in action by using yq - a tool we can consider "the jq for YAML", and using Python with PyYAML.

By the way, this post is part of a trilogy of posts dedicated to markup and serialization formats, so be sure not to miss