Yay is a scripting language in YAML. It is readable and light and meant to automate simple tasks. You can use it to glue API requests, user input and file manipulation together.

Main features

• Simple and readable scripting in YAML syntax
• Lightweight reuse of HTTP calls and REST interaction patterns
• Store parameters outside your scripts and easily switch contexts
• Store passwords and other secrets outside your script
• Easy JSON and YAML processing with JSON path
• Out-of-the-box user interaction to create wizards
• Create DSLs on the fly

License: Apache 2.0

Note: Yay is no longer under active development but has a successor: Instacli!. Using mostly the same syntax and ideas... Check it out!

The starting point for Yay is to reuse HTTP requests that you would do off the command line but are too long to actually remember.

Suppose you have this request:

$ http GET http://localhost:25125/recipes

You can save it in a YAML file and reuse it using Yay.

File: list-recipes.yay

Http GET:
  url:  http://localhost:25125
  path: /recipes
Print as JSON: ${output}

Invoke it using the yay command:

$ yay list-recipes

Yay is bundled with a test application. Start it with the following command

$ python -m yay.test_server

Running the above example will give the following output:

$ yay list-recipes
[
  "Mango and coconut ice cream",
  "Ratatouille",
  "Meatballs"
]

For more examples, read the Tutorial.

For a more detailed look at Yay code, take a look at the test/yay directory, containing the Yay unit tests -- written in Yay of course.

Yay is written in Python 3.7. So you will need to install Python 3.7 on your local machine (Please Google the current recommended way to do so) or use the supplied Dockerfile to run Yay in a container.

Notes to install on Macos Monterey with Python 3.10:

$ python3 -m pip install wheel
$ python3 setup.py bdist_wheel
$ sudo python3 -m pip install dist/*.whl
$ sudo python3 setup.py develop

Use the following command to install Yay locally:

$ python setup.py install

Test it out with the following command:

$ yay example/Hello

This should result in a friendly greeting:

Hello from Yay!

Create a directory .yay in your home folder to store defaults.

The default-variables.yaml file contains default variables. Useful for server endpoints and passwords. By storing server addresses and passwords in this file, you don't have to hardcode them in your scripts.

Example:

exampleUrl: http://user:pass@example.com:25125
exampleEndpoint:
    url: http://example.com
    username: user
    password: pass
    headers:
        X-My-Header: Header value

In a Yay script you would be able to refer to ${exampleUrl} or ${exampleEndpoint} respectively

Http endpoint: ${exampleEndpoint}
Http GET: /hello

Any script that in the ~/.yay directory can be called directly from Yay. For example, by creating .yay/Hello.yay, you can invoke

$ yay Hello

from any directory.

Use the following command to install Yay locally and have changes in the Yay code immediately available:

$ python setup.py develop

Run the tests with the following command:

$ pytest -v test

Most of the tests are written in Yay and can be found in the test/yay directory.

First, check the version in setup.py and make sure it is correct. Also make sure all files are committed to Git.

Create a local installaion

$ python setup.py install

Tag latest commit with the version that was produced, e.g. yay-0.12.

To create the Dockerfile, run the following command, then tag the image and upload it to Dockerhub

$ docker build .
$ docker tag <IMAGE_ID> hsiemelink/yay:<VERSION>
$ docker push hsiemelink/yay:<VERSION>

Now update the version in setup.py to reflect the new version, e.g. 0.12-SNAPSHOT and commit. Don't forget to push the tag...