Design

Configuration File Rationale

The Bang configuration file structure came about with the following goals in mind:

• Readability (by humans)
• Not another bespoke serialization format
• Conciseness

While JSON would allow for there to be one less package dependency, YAML was chosen as the overall serialization format because of its focus on human readability.

In its earliest forms, Bang had its own SSH logic and used Chef for configuration management. When Ansible was identified as being a suitable replacement for the builtin SSH logic and for Chef, it made even more sense to continue using YAML for the file format because users could use the same format for configuring Bang and for authoring Ansible playbooks.