policyyaml

Policyyaml is a human-readable, YAML-based policy language used to declare governance and security rules for software systems. It emphasizes declarative policies that can be versioned, audited, and automated, and is designed to be readable by both humans and machines.

Structure commonly includes fields such as apiVersion, kind, metadata, and spec. The spec contains one or more rules. Each rule has an identifier, a description, a match clause that describes the target resources or actions, and an effect such as allow or deny. Conditions may reference user, resource, action, environment, and other attributes.

Validation and tooling: policies are validated against a defined schema or policy schema. Tooling such as linters, simulators, and test harnesses check syntax and evaluate policy behavior under scenarios before deployment. Policies are typically stored in version control and applied through an orchestrator or policy engine.

Use cases include access control, compliance enforcement, configuration governance, and resource management. Policyyaml can integrate with policy engines or admission controllers to enforce rules at runtime, and may support composition through policy sets or imports.

History and adoption vary by ecosystem; policyyaml emerged as a common YAML-based approach in policy-as-code workflows, with several implementations and community standards. Compatibility is largely determined by the project or vendor providing the policy engine.

Example

apiVersion: policyyaml.org/v1

kind: Policy

metadata:

name: deny-root-login

spec:

description: Deny login attempts by privileged users

rules:

- id: R1

match:

user: "root"

action: "login"

effect: deny