General Information about Cloud-Config
The cloud-config format implements a declarative syntax for many common configuration items, making it easy to accomplish many tasks. It also allows you to specify arbitrary commands for anything that falls outside of the predefined declarative capabilities.
This "best of both worlds" approach lets the file acts like a configuration file for common tasks, while maintaining the flexibility of a script for more complex functionality.
YAML Formatting
The file is written using the YAML data serialization format. The YAML format was created to be easy to understand for humans and easy to parse for programs.
YAML files are generally fairly intuitive to understand when reading them, but it is good to know the actual rules that govern them.
Some important rules for YAML files are:
- Indentation with whitespace indicates the structure and relationship of the items to one another. Items that are more indented are sub-items of the first item with a lower level of indentation above them.
- List members can be identified by a leading dash.
- Associative array entries are created by using a colon (:) followed by a space and the value.
- Blocks of text are indented. To indicate that the block should be read as-is, with the formatting maintained, use the pipe character (|) before the block.
