ryl

ryl is a fast YAML linter and formatter written in Rust. It checks YAML style, applies safe lint fixes, and formats files with configurable layout. It is usable today, but edge-case behaviour is still maturing.

Full documentation lives at https://ryl-docs.pages.dev/.

ryl targets YAML 1.2. See YAML version compatibility for how version directives and implicit types affect linting and formatting.

Coming from yamllint? See the migration guide.

Quick start

ryl enables no rules by default, so it needs a configuration or --enable that turns rules on. --enable ALL runs every rule for a one-off run, and --enable <RULES> runs just the named rules; for a project, drop a .ryl.toml at the root (see Configuration).

ryl check is the lint subcommand and the recommended form; ryl format is the formatter. Bare ryl <paths> still lints identically but is deprecated: it prints a warning to stderr (silenced by --no-warnings) and a later release will remove it, so prefer ryl check.

# Using uv (Python)
uvx ryl check --enable ALL .

# Omit selected rules and files without writing a config
uvx ryl check --enable ALL --disable line-length,truthy,document-start --exclude pnpm-lock.yaml .

# Using npx (Node.js)
npx @owenlamont/ryl check --enable ALL .

# Format in place, or check formatting in CI
uvx ryl format .
uvx ryl format --check .

For prek / pre-commit integration, see ryl-pre-commit.

Installation

uv tool install ryl                 # uv
npm install -g @owenlamont/ryl      # npm
pip install ryl                     # pip
cargo install ryl                   # cargo
pixi global install ryl             # conda-forge
winget install owenlamont.ryl       # winget (Windows)

Building from source (cargo install, or a pip sdist) needs Rust 1.99.0 or newer. The prebuilt wheels, npm, conda-forge and winget packages do not.

Status and scope

• ryl format formats YAML in place without enabling lint rules. Its --check and --diff modes preview changes without writing; [format] in TOML controls the style. It also formats embedded YAML in Markdown with --markdown.
• ryl includes 27 rules, including tags, merge-keys, block-scalar-chomping, and unicode-line-breaks. The rule reference and per-rule pages are at https://ryl-docs.pages.dev/rules/.
• Auto-fixing (--fix) is supported for braces, brackets, colons, commas, comments, comments-indentation, document-end, document-start, empty-lines, hyphens, key-ordering, new-line-at-end-of-file, new-lines, quoted-strings, trailing-spaces, and truthy (case only, e.g. True to true). The set of rules that may apply fixes is configurable via the TOML lint.fixable/lint.unfixable keys.
• --diff previews those safe fixes as a unified diff on stdout instead of writing them (modelled on ruff check --diff); it is mutually exclusive with --fix, works with stdin, and exits 1 iff some file would change.
• TOML is the recommended configuration format and supports the lint.fixable/lint.unfixable fix policy, [lint.per-file-ignores], and rule options such as allow-double-quotes-for-escaping.
• TOML assigns each file a source kind via the [files] table (yaml = [...], markdown = [...]). The legacy yaml-files key is YAML-only; in TOML use [files].yaml.
• YAML embedded in Markdown (front matter and fenced yaml/yml blocks) can be linted by listing globs under [files].markdown; diagnostics map back to the Markdown file. It is off by default; --fix writes safe fixes back into the embedded blocks and --diff previews them at the host-file level. See https://ryl-docs.pages.dev/markdown/.
• YAML configuration (.yamllint, .yamllint.yml, .yamllint.yaml, including the default, relaxed, and empty presets via extends) still works but is deprecated and warns; convert it with ryl --migrate-configs --migrate-write.
• --list-files prints the files ryl would lint (after ignores and config discovery) and exits, without running rules. --no-warnings suppresses warning-level diagnostics in the output. --strict turns a warning-only run into exit code 2; TOML [lint] strict = true enables the same behavior for a project, and --no-strict overrides the config. --enable <RULES> runs exactly the listed rules (comma-separated IDs, or ALL) in place of the config's selection, and needs no config file. --disable <RULES> subtracts from the selected lint rules. --exclude <GLOBS> replaces config file exclusions; globs use the current directory and also exclude explicitly named files. Both new flags accept comma-separated values and may appear once per command.
• ryl check and ryl format cache results by content and configuration. Use --no-cache to bypass the cache or --cache-dir PATH to place it elsewhere. See caching.
• Pass - as the input to read YAML from stdin (ruff convention). Add --stdin-filename <PATH> so diagnostics, project-config discovery, and path-based filtering (yaml-files, per-file-ignores, per-rule ignore) use that filename. Without it, diagnostics are labelled <stdin>, config is anchored at the current working directory, and all path-based filtering is skipped so every enabled rule runs. - cannot be combined with other inputs; --fix cannot read from stdin, but --diff can.
• ryl server runs ryl as a Language Server (LSP) over stdio, giving editors inline diagnostics, a source.fixAll.ryl code action, and formatting via ryl format. It complements Red Hat's yaml-language-server rather than replacing it, and is built in by default (a minimal binary without it builds with cargo install ryl --no-default-features). See https://ryl-docs.pages.dev/editor-integration/.
• Run ryl --help for the authoritative CLI reference.

For installation walkthroughs, configuration presets, and per-rule documentation, see the docs site.

Performance

The chart times ryl against yamllint and three formatters on pinned real-world YAML: single files from 1 KiB to 9.4 MiB, and 1 to 1,000 files of under 16 KiB (98% of the 76,000 YAML files in the 40 pinned repos are under 16 KiB). Both axes are logarithmic.

The format panel uses max common work: every formatter configured for output as close as its options allow, plus the two rewrites all four offer, single quotes and folding long lines at 80 columns. It is the most work each tool can be asked to do in common. Median of 10 runs; peak RSS is the median of 3 more:

ryl formats faster than the other three at every size and file count, except a single 1 KiB file, where it ties yamlfmt (within 1%, mostly process startup). yamlfmt uses less memory up to 16 KiB (5.5–6.5 MiB against ryl's 8.4–8.6 MiB). The same holds under the other two profiles, where a lone 1 KiB file is up to 5% slower than yamlfmt.

Profiles and what they cannot equalise:

• Max common work (charted): aligned configs plus single quotes and folding at 80 columns; 91–96% identical lines, as each tool folds differently.
• Aligned configs: each formatter set up to produce output as close to the others' as its options allow. ryl quote-style = "double", max-blank-lines = 1, comment-spacing = 1, comment-starting-space = "preserve", brace-spacing = true; yamlfmt retain_line_breaks_single, double quotes, pad_line_comments: 1, trim_trailing_whitespace; dprint and Prettier defaults. Pairwise identical lines are 94–98%. The rest: ryl's double quote style also removes quotes no value needs, yamlfmt drops ---, dprint keeps inline comment alignment, and dprint and Prettier wrap long strings at 80 columns.
• Defaults: each tool with no configuration, so each does different work.
• Lint: yamllint reads extends: default and ryl reads the TOML that ryl --migrate-configs writes from the same file. On the benchmark inputs they share 43,569 diagnostics; yamllint alone reports 36 (20 braces inside Jinja {{ }}, 10 trailing-spaces inside block scalars, 6 comments, comments-indentation and document-start) and ryl alone 2 (document-start).

Every run gets a fresh copy of its inputs and an empty cache directory, with ryl's and Prettier's caches off and dprint's incremental mode off; dprint keeps its compiled plugin, an install artifact. Tools alternate order run to run. yamlfmt is the native release binary, not a launcher; ryl, dprint and yamlfmt may use several threads, Prettier and yamllint one. Inputs are files every tool accepts under every profile, which excludes Helm templates and other non-YAML. Each size point is a different file, so content varies along that axis.

The benchmark script reruns everything and draws the chart; --tool-versions latest uses the newest release of each tool instead of the pins in scripts/benchmark_tool_versions.toml, and records the versions used.

Acknowledgements

This project exists thanks to the tooling and ecosystems around YAML linting and developer automation, especially:

• yamllint - for giving me the shoulders to stand on and the source of many of the automated tests that ryl uses now to check for behaviour parity. Copying the behaviour of an existing tool is infinitely easier than building one from scratch - there'd be no ryl without yamllint.
• ruff - for showing the power of Rust tooling for Python development and inspiring the config and API for ryl.
• rumdl - for giving me another template to follow for Rust tooling.
• saphyr - ryl's vendored YAML DOM is derived from saphyr, and saphyr's developers were very patient in showing some of the nuance and complexity of parsing YAML which I was embarrassingly ignorant of when starting ryl.
• granit-parser - a saphyr-parser fork with comment and style metadata; ryl's own parser, ryl-yaml-parser, is forked from granit-parser 2.0.0.
• esbuild and biome - for providing the "binary wrapper" blueprint for distributing high-performance native tools via NPM.