Is it intentional that bitbucket-pipelinese.yml indentation level must be 4?

Question

I just spent couple of hours figuring out why my pipelines configuration fails. All messages just said that tabs cannot be used for indentation and that it is important to use consistent indentation.

So finally I thought of trying indentation level of 4 and pipeline started working. No yaml linters catched that either.

If it is intentional could it be added to errors / docs that indentation of 4 spaces is the only supported one?

Mikael Lepistö · Answer

Yes, thanks for the info! I used indentation level 2 so exactly that happened.

Do you know why yml doesn't consider dash to be first character of a row?

xtjhin · Answer

YML allows any amount of spaces. You can use 1 or even 5 spaces. However, YML uses an indentation to determine structure.

One of the common issues is:

pipelines:
  default:
    - step:
      script:
        - echo "Only runs if no branch pipeline is matched"

Instead of interpreting script to be a child under step: , YML will interpret script as a sibling.

If you indent script by 1 space, it should work.

pipelines:
  default:
    - step:
        script:
          - echo "Only runs if no branch pipeline is matched"

Was this the problem you encountered?