In this new post to his site Sameer Borate looks at using the TOML configuration file format in a PHP application.

As any one who has programmed knows about configuration files. Configuration files are mostly text files used to configure the parameters and initial settings for computer programs – mostly user applications, operating system settings.

[...] In this post we will look into parsing TOML files in PHP. TOML is a configuration file format that is intended to be easy to read due to its obvious semantics and is designed to map unambiguously to a dictionary data structure. “TOML”, the name, is an acronym for “Tom’s Obvious, Minimal Language” referring to its creator Tom Preston-Werner.

He starts with an example of a configuration file in the TOML format and, following the installation/used of the yosymfony/toml library, the result of it being parsed. He also includes an example of using the same library to build out a TOML configuration and dump it to a string for output.

On the Laravel News site today there's a tutorial posted introducing you to TOML configuration, a new configuration file structure that's designed to be easy for humans to read and highly flexible (all while staying relatively simple).

TOML is a configuration file format language that is intended to be minimal and easy to read. TOML stands for “Tom’s Obvious, Minimal Language,” which refers to the creator Tom Preston-Werner.

[...] TOML aims to be a minimal configuration file format that’s easy to read due to obvious semantics. TOML is designed to map unambiguously to a hash table. TOML should be easy to parse into data structures in a wide variety of languages.

In order to work with it in PHP (since there is no native support) they show you how to install the yosymfony/toml package. The tutorial then walks you through an example TOML configuration file and what the result of using the package to parse it looks like. It then takes it a step further an converts one of the database configuration files for a Laravel application to the TOML format. It also shows the reverse - using the package to create a TOML file and the resulting output.