Converting YAML file to python dict

I think your yaml file should look like (or at least something like, so it's structured correctly anyway):

instance:
     Id: i-aaaaaaaa
     environment: us-east
     serverId: someServer
     awsHostname: ip-someip
     serverName: somewebsite.com
     ipAddr: 192.168.0.1
     roles: [webserver,php]

Then, yaml.load(...) returns:

{'instance': {'environment': 'us-east', 'roles': ['webserver', 'php'], 'awsHostname': 'ip-someip', 'serverName': 'somewebsite.com', 'ipAddr': '192.168.0.1', 'serverId': 'someServer', 'Id': 'i-aaaaaaaa'}}

And you can go from there...

So used like:

>>> for key, value in yaml.load(open('test.txt'))['instance'].iteritems():
    print key, value


environment us-east
roles ['webserver', 'php']
awsHostname ip-someip
serverName somewebsite.com
ipAddr 192.168.0.1
serverId someServer
Id i-aaaaaaaa

An additional bug in your code, that doesn't have to do with YAML:

for key in dict:
    if key in dict == "instanceId": # This doesn't do what you want
        print key, dict[key]

in is an operator that works on sequence types, and also on maps. This is why this isn't a syntax error... but it doesn't do what you want.

key in dict will always evaluate to True, because all the keys you're iterating through are in the dict. So your code boils down to True == "instanceId", which will always evaluate to False, because the boolean value True is never equal to that string.

You might have noticed that the print statement doesn't produce any output; this is because it never gets called.