community.general.to_yaml filter – Convert variable to YAML string

Note

This filter plugin is part of the community.general collection (version 12.6.1).

You might already have this collection installed if you are using the ansible package. It is not included in ansible-core. To check whether it is installed, run ansible-galaxy collection list.

To install it, use: ansible-galaxy collection install community.general.

To use it in a playbook, specify: community.general.to_yaml.

New in community.general 11.3.0

Synopsis
Input
Keyword parameters
Notes
Examples
Return Value

Synopsis

Converts an Ansible variable into a YAML string representation, without preserving vaulted strings as ansible.builtin.to_yaml.
This filter functions as a wrapper to the Python PyYAML library‘s yaml.dump function.

Input

This describes the input of the filter, the value before | community.general.to_yaml.

Parameter	Comments
Input any / required	A variable or expression that returns a data structure.

Keyword parameters

This describes keyword parameters of the filter. These are the values key1=value1, key2=value2 and so on in the following example: input | community.general.to_yaml(key1=value1, key2=value2, ...)

Parameter	Comments
canonical boolean	If set to `true`, export tag type to the output. Choices: `false` `true`
default_style string	Indicates the style of the scalar. Choices: `""` `"'"` `"\""` `"\|"` `">"`
encoding string	Specify the output encoding.
explicit_end boolean	If set to `true`, adds an explicit end using `...`. Choices: `false` `true`
explicit_start boolean	If set to `true`, adds an explicit start using `---`. Choices: `false` `true`
indent integer	Number of spaces to indent Python structures, mainly used for display to humans.
line_break string	Specify the line break.
redact_sensitive_values boolean	If set to `true`, vaulted strings are replaced by `<redacted>` instead of being decrypted. With future ansible-core versions, this can extend to other strings tagged as sensitive. Note that with ansible-core 2.18 and before this might not yield the expected result since these versions of ansible-core strip the vault information away from strings that are part of more complex data structures specified in `vars`. Choices: `false` ← (default) `true`
sort_keys boolean	Affects sorting of dictionary keys. Choices: `false` `true` ← (default)
width integer	Set the preferred line width.

Notes

Note

More options may be available, see PyYAML documentation for details.
These parameters to yaml.dump are not accepted, as they are overridden internally: allow_unicode.

Examples

---
# Dump variable in a template to create a YAML document
value: "{{ github_workflow | community.general.to_yaml }}"

---
# Same as above but 'prettier' (equivalent to community.general.to_nice_yaml filter)
value: "{{ docker_config | community.general.to_yaml(indent=2) }}"

Return Value

Key	Description
Return value string	The YAML serialized string representing the variable structure inputted. Returned: success

Authors

Ansible Core Team
Felix Fontein (@felixfontein)

Collection links

© 2012–2018 Michael DeHaan
© 2018–2025 Red Hat, Inc.
Licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3.
https://docs.ansible.com/projects/ansible/latest/collections/community/general/to_yaml_filter.html