Creating standalone show files

You can create a subfolder called shows in your machine config folder or within a mode config folder. Then inside that folder, you can create separate files, where each file is its own show. The files need to have a .yaml extension, and the name of the file before the extension is the name of the show as you’d refer to it in your MPF configs.

A few notes for creating show files:

  • MPF config files are case sensitive. It is best to stick to some kind of convention (such as lowercase names with underscores).
  • Show names are “machine-wide” within MPF. This means that if you have two different shows with the same name in different locations, MPF will get confused.
  • Valid characters for show names are z-x, 0-9, and the underscore. Python objects cannot contain dashes in their names, meaning your show file names cannot include dashes.

Here is a sample show file. This file might be called something like flash_red.yaml and would be located in your machine’s /shows folder:

##! show: my_show
#show_version=5
- time: 0
  lights:
    led1: red
- time: +1
  lights:
    led1: off
- time: +1
This example is tested to be valid MPF config. However, it is not integration tested.
##! show: my_show
#show_version=5
- time: 0
  lights:
    led1: red
- time: +1
  lights:
    led1: off
- time: +1

Notice it’s essentially the same show we used as an example in the section on show config formats. However there’s one important change.

Since this is a standalone show file, we need to tell MPF what “version” of the show format this file is. MPF versions 0.53+ use show_version=5. If we ever change something in the show format, then we’ll increment the version. (Don’t worry though, we have and automated migration tool that converts shows to the new formats. That’s actually part of the reason we include the show_version in the show files)

The bottom line is that when you create a .yaml show file, the first line of the file must be #show_version=5 so MPF knows it’s working with the proper type of file.

Beyond that, the show file follows the show format covered elsewhere in this documentation. You can nest show files into subfolders under the /shows folder if you want to, and in can put /shows folders in both your machine-wide and mode-specific folders. (The /shows folder should be in the root of your machine config or the root of a mode folder. It does not go inside the /config folder.)