Unable to print string containing double quotes in GitLab CI YAML

Question

I'm using the CI Lint tester to try and figure out how to store an expected JSON result, which I later compare to a curl response. Neither of these work:

Attempt 1

---
  image: ruby:2.1
  script:
  - EXPECT_SERVER_OUTPUT='{"message": "Hello World"}'

Fails with:

did not find expected key while parsing a block mapping at line 4 column 5

Attempt 2

---
  image: ruby:2.1
  script:
  - EXPECT_SERVER_OUTPUT="{\"message\": \"Hello World\"}"

Fails with:

jobs:script config should be a hash

I've tried using various combinations of echo as well, without a working solution.

Answer 1

You could use literal block scalar¹ style notation and put the variable definition and subsequent script lines on separate lines² without worrying about quoting:

myjob:
  script:
    - |
      EXPECT_SERVER_OUTPUT='{"message": "Hello World"}'

or you can escape the nested double quotes:

myjob:
  script:
    - "EXPECT_SERVER_OUTPUT='{\"message\": \"Hello World\"}'"

but you may also want to just use variables like:

myjob:
  variables:
    EXPECT_SERVER_OUTPUT: '{"message": "Hello World"}'
  script:
    - dothething.sh

^{Note: variables are expanded inside variable definitions so take care with any $ characters inside the variable value (they must be written as $$ to be literal).}

^{1See this answer for an explanation of this and related notation
2See this section of the GitLab docs for more info on multi-line commands}

Answer 2

I made it work like this:

  script: |
   "EXPECT_SERVER_OUTPUT='{\"message\": \"Hello World\"}'"
   echo $EXPECT_SERVER_OUTPUT