What are YAML files used for?

Question

I keep seeing them throughout GitHub repos, but I’m not sure what their purpose is. I tried looking it up on Google, but the explanations did not suffice. If you know their use, please ELI5

In: Technology

Answer 1

YAML is a file format for holding structured data, like JSON or XML. It’s not meant for any specific purpose, you can use it to hold any kind of data you want. Different projects on Github can use YAML files for different purposes.

YAML is specifically meant to be both computer readable and human readable. Unlike JSON and XML which have a very rigid structure (which is easy for a computer to parse but harder to a human), YAML has a more flexible structure that makes it more human readable.