title: How to create configuration files that contain colons in YAML?
body: <p>According to <a href="https://gitlab.com/ci/lint" rel="noreferrer">CI's lint</a>, this yml is not valid:</p>
  
  <pre><code>pages:
    stage: deploy
    image: python:3.5
    script:
    - echo "foo: $VAR" &gt; site.yml
    - cat ~/.python-gitlab.cfg
  
    artifacts:
      paths:
        - _build
    only:
      - master
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>jobs:pages:script config should be a string or an array of strings
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>If I remove the colon on the <code>echo</code> line, it works.</p>
  
  <p>What I want to do is to create some configuration files on the fly, to comply to existing tools, using private variables, like <code>echo "url: $CI_PROJECT_URL" &gt; site.yml</code> to produce</p>
  
  <pre><code>url: "https://gitlab.com/group/project"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But I can't do this because the yaml is said invalid, and I don't find workarounds. Or I must write code around my tools to pass command line arguments instead of reading config files. Still, this colon stuff seems a bug.</p>