Erik Zaadi

The tales of a developer with passion for dad jokes

Linting Ansible YAML in vim

ZOMG UPDATE!!1

My pull request for syntastic was merged!

I love Ansible, and one of the reasons is YAML…

But there’s just so many YAML gotcha’s.

In vim (Yes, the mighties of editors, that of course you are using right???????), I’m using the excellent vim-ansible-yaml plugin that not only adds syntax highlighting, but also snippets (YAY!).

Still though, I’ve been bitten more than once with those GOTCHA’z, a small escaping here and there.

Suddenly, as I was reading through DevOps Weekly when I stumbled across ansible-dk, a kit with various tools for working with Ansible.

One of the gems there that I wasn’t familiar with was ansible-lint.

Suddenly a thought hit me, what if I’ll lint my Ansible YAML files within vim! That’d be truly geek-a-licous!!1

So I forked syntastic (ZOMG!!1) and added a syntax checker that uses ansible-lint.

AWESOMENESS achieved…

So suddenly I was productive, well, once I removed 1232133 whitespace errors.

but ALAS

ansible-lint won’t work if the YAML file is borked and not a valid YAML.

I needed the current files filetype to be both ansible and yaml.

So I could do an autocmd in my .vimrc that’ll set the filetype to both by using a dot as a connector:

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au BufNewFile,BufRead *.yaml set filetype=yaml.ansible

But that would add Ansible linting non Ansible YAML, which sucks.

Fork to the rescue again

I forked vim-ansible-yaml, which does some magic to tell if the YAML file edited is indeed an Ansible YAML file.

I added that simple dot notation to the ftdetect part and VOILA, NERDGASM achieved!

MAKE IT WORKz FOR ME!!1

Either wait for the pull requests to land, OR:

Use my forks in your Vundle / Pathogen / NeoWHATEVER:

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Plugin 'erikzaadi/vim-ansible-yaml'

NO LONGER NEEDED, just update your syntastic!

Plugin 'erikzaadi/syntastic'

And then go to your <vundle install dir>/syntastic and do git checkout ansible-syntax-checker

Live long and deploy fast

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