Dangling meta character '*' near index 0 when running pipeline

Build Environment
1

Hi,
1st time user of CircleCI here, I’m a bit puzzled since I think I’ve done my homework before I attempted to migrate the pipeline from Gitlab to Github and CircleCI. I did made a few yaml errors that where pointed out by the debugging when running jobs but now I’m just getting the error that is in the title.
Can anyone point me in the direction to troubleshoot this?, I do have a few ‘*’ on the configuration but I believe that are correctly escaped.
You can see my config.yml here:

https://pastebin.com/fPpgFvWX

Any assistance will be more than appreciated,

Cheers

2

Use this online parser to work out where the issue is.

I currently get this error on your YAML:

while scanning for the next token
found character '\t' that cannot start any token
  in "<unicode string>", line 9, column 33:
              POSTGRES_DB: myproject

That makes me wonder if you have tabs in there - have a look at the doc in your IDE with invisible characters shown. If you find some, swap them to spaces.

3

Thank you!, I just checked and that error was introduced when anonymizing the configuration for Pastebin. On the actual file there is no tab anywhere, I use vim and I have enabled markings to show whitespace so I can usually avoid those issues.

Any more suggestions will be well recieved.

4

OK, check the new file in the parser again, and if that does not return any errors, post a new copy of the file.

5

OK there it is, just changed again the values for the DB variables.

https://pastebin.com/aPJJDcgj

6

I think I can see five indentation problems. Here is the first one (occurs twice):

     - checkout
      - restore_cache:

Comb through the file and fix all five, and then post another one if it still does not work. Don’t forget to verify it again :slight_smile:

7

Thank you again, that has to be a display issue, as you can see here in the raw version that specific case is not actually there, https://pastebin.com/raw/aPJJDcgj

Also yamllint and CircleCI debugger did show 2 of those cases, now they have been corrected.

8

Gotcha, yes - looks like a Pastebin glitch.

This YAML snippet looks out of place:

  hold:
    type: approval
    requires: build

I assume that should be a job step, rather than standing alone?

9

Well I just followed the documentation as it appars here: https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/configuration-reference/#type

But thank you, I just realized that I forgot to include the dependency for the production deployment.

10

Yes, I wonder if a bit more clarity is required there. I’ve changed my mind though - I would now guess that that section should appear in a workflow (the requires being the same as your current usage).

11

Turns out it was indeed the RegEx for * a dot is required before all asterisk in the configuration.

12

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