YAML Tips and Gotchas

The Topbeat configuration file uses YAML for its syntax. When you edit the file to modify configuration settings, there are a few things that you should know.

Indentation is meaningful in YAML. Make sure that you use spaces, rather than tab characters, to indent sections.

The best way to understand where to define a configuration option is by looking at the topbeat.yml configuration file. The configuration file contains most of the configuration options that are available for Topbeat. To change a configuration setting, simply uncomment the line and change the setting.

You can test your configuration file to verify that the structure is valid. Simply run Topbeat in the foreground with the -configtest flag specified. For example:

topbeat -c topbeat.yml -configtest

You’ll see a message if Topbeat finds an error in the file.

If you need to specify a regular expression in a YAML file, it’s a good idea to wrap the regular expression in single quotation marks to work around YAML’s tricky rules for string escaping.

For more information about YAML, see http://yaml.org/.