Why are we templating YAML?

> real selling point of JSON

Is that really the selling point? I interact with numerous services that speak JSON...and most of them aren't written in JS. YAML and JSON both have to be parsed to be used, even by JS. Otherwise it's just a string.

To me the real selling point in JSON is the dead-simplicity for humans to read and CHANGE. YAML is human-READABLE, but frankly I often screw up changing it because the formatting is a little too magical and I'm a little too unfamiliar. JSON is downright picky and obnoxious...but that makes it really easy to make a change. Screw up the quotes? It'll complain about the quote. Dangling comma? It will complain. Did I cut-and-paste from an HTML display that screwed up my whitespace by compressing everything down to a single space? Nothing cares.

I personally love Python where whitespace matters a lot too. But I regularly find myself fighting with the whitespace in yaml for some reason.

To me yaml (especially with templating) seems like a very contrived way of avoiding having to program, while still effectively programming. I much prefer json, or if more intelligence is required, actual javascript objects.

The only big downside of json where yaml does shine is the support for comments within your files.

LOL we are doing the same with k8s. We deploy to any environment, where each environment is a different k8s namespace. We even have a namespace for each developer. The variables are things like the image name (the tag is effectively a git commit id, or sometimes different for not-committed yet stuff). Beyond that just about nothing really needs to be a variable, but we do have different RAM amounts.

We have a couple ways that we template this out, but mostly we literally just do this in bash:

    sed -e "s/\$CI_COMMIT_SHA/$CI_COMMIT_SHA/" kube-deploy.template.yaml | kubectl -n $ENV apply -f -

(Where CI_COMMIT_SHA comes from gitlab) ENV comes from our gitlab CI file.

That all being said, the extent of our k8s integration is lots of stuff like that. We could write a JS file that creates a JSON k8s template, but honestly, that would be more work and more learning than we had to for what we're doing. Why would we do more just because we want to avoid templating in a YAML file?

because people are trying to use configuration files for the things that programming languages are made for. it's masturbation.

The best thing that ever happened to Cloud Formation was the new YAML syntax.

Writing YAML is easy with a good editor like VSCode. Install the YAML code outline extension for sugar; works great for OpenAPI specs. YAML flow style offers some good options for keeping the file compact.