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What do these command mean in buildkit build pipeline?

  • command:
  • command: |
  • command: >-

I am trying to build a build pipeline and I can't find any documentations on them. What are the differences between them?

example:

  • command: | npm install

  • command: npm install

  • command: >- npm install

cam
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1 Answers1

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YAML has various ways to specify string properties:

single-quoted: "a single that can have : and other weird characters"
single-unquoted: another single command (but needs to avoid some special YAML characters, such as ":"
single-split: >
  a single
  line string
  command that's
  broken over
  multiple-lines
multi-line: |
  a
  multi-line
  string

Putting that into https://yaml-online-parser.appspot.com you can see how it ends up:

{
  "single-quoted": "a single line command", 
  "single-unquoted": "another single command (but needs to avoid some special YAML characters, such as \":\"", 
  "single-split": "a single line string command that's broken over multiple-lines",
  "multi-line": "a\nmulti-line\ncommand\n"
}

You can find some related questions here about this too: In YAML, how do I break a string over multiple lines?

There's also some more examples here: https://yaml-multiline.info

These are the three most common formats for Buildkite pipeline.yml commands are these:

command: "simple-command"

command: |
  npm install
  npm test

command:
  - "npm install"
  - "npm test"

(you can use command and commands interchangably)

For both of those last two examples, the commands in the list will be run in sequence, and fail as soon as any one of them fails. i.e. if the npm install command fails, the job will immediately finish with a failed state.

Tim Lucas
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