Installing YAMLScript locally

Learn how to install YAMLScript locally to solve Exercism's exercises on your own machine

To write programs in YAMLScript you need to install the YAMLScript command line interpreter. This is a binary executable file called ys. It currently works on:

  • Linux / Intel
  • Linux / ARM
  • MacOS / Intel
  • MacOS / ARM

Note: Windows support is planned, but not yet available.

Releases are available on GitHub.

Automatic Installation

To solve the Exercism YAMLScript exercises you repeatedly modify your solution program and run make test until all the tests pass.

That's it!

The first time you run make test it will try to install the specific version of the ys interpreter that is required for the exercise in the /path/to/exercism/yamlscript/.local/ directory.

If you've already installed that version of ys somewhere in your PATH, then it will silently copy the ys interpreter to the correct place.

If not it will prompt you to do a binary release installation, which generally only takes a few seconds.

If that fails (rare, but it happens sometimes) it will prompt you to do an automated build from source, which can take a few minutes (but is very reliable and requires no interaction).

You will only encounter this the first time you run make test. All exercises that are set to use the same version of ys will use the same installation.

Note: You can also use the make install-ys command separately from make test. It will do exactly the same installation process as make test, but without running the tests afterwards.

For more information about installing YAMLScript, especially for using it outside of Exercism, see the YAMLScript Installation Documentation.