Toml format for config files

If you have worked with configuration files from Windows right from the early days with Windows 3.1 to the newer versions of Windows common today, you may have seen the .ini text files on your disk. These are configuration files, and were (and still are) a popular alternative to the YAML (Yet Another Markup Language / Yaml Aint Markup Language) configuration files that are common today.

The simplicity of these .ini files and also that they do not rely on indentation (do you prefer tabs or spaces? 😜 ) make them easy to work with. Forgot a space at the start of the line? No problem. The configuration file is still human-readable.

Tom Preston-Werner (GitHub founder, Gravatar founder, Jekyll founder, …) loved .ini files too and so defined a standard for it, TOML (Tom’s Obvious Minimal Language). The spec includes strings (with quotes), numbers, boolean values, date-time values (no quotes), and arrays. These can be divided into sections. Arrays and sections can be nested. White spaces are permitted and comments can be added with a “#”.

Here’s a simple example:

[general]
servers = ["1.1.1.1", "8.8.8.8"]
data = '/tmp/data_file'
last_run = 1955-03-19T00:00:00+0400