Anchors

Anchors

man:
  name: Utibe
  age: 1000
  galaxy: milky-way
  dinosaursExist: no
alien:
  name: kal-el
  age: 10000000
  galaxy: milky-way
  dinosaursExist: no
names:
  - Utibe
  - kal-el

As you can see, we have a names key that lists the names of both man and alien. However, this is not ideal as we are writing out the names multiple times and if the name changes we have to change each reference to it. YAML has a feature known as anchors that allows us to reference a value. Here’s how it works

man:
  name: &man Utibe
  age: 1000
  galaxy: milky-way
  dinosaursExist: no
alien:
  name: &alien kal-el
  age: 10000000
  galaxy: milky-way
  dinosaursExist: no
names:
  - *man
  - *alien

Remove Redundancy With Anchors

metadata: &metadata
  galaxy: milky-way
  dinosaursExist: no
man:
  name: &man Utibe
  age: 1000
  <<: *metadata
alien:
  name: &alien kal-el
  age: 10000000
  <<: *metadata
names:
  - *man
  - *alien

And to overide standard template metadata in this example with specific values simply overwrite at the end as if the last thing read is what happens like in CSS

man:
  name: &man Utibe
  age: 1000
  <<: *metadata
  galaxy: another-galaxy

---

Backlinks

• 2022-02-17 (DevLog)
• Cool Yaml Features You Probably Didn’t Know About (DevLog)