Toml

TOML stands for Tom’s Obvious, Minimal Language.
It’s a very simple configuration file format — similar to INI, but more structured and modern.

Example .toml file:

# Project metadata
title = "My Project"  # Project title
debug = true          # Enable debug mode

# Database settings
[database]
host = "localhost"    # Database host
port = 5432           # Database port

# Authentication settings
[auth]
methods = ["password", "oauth"]  # Allowed authentication methods

# Admin users
[[admins]]
name = "Anna"         # Admin name
role = "admin"        # Admin role

[[admins]]
name = "Ben"
role = "superadmin"

Key facts:

• It’s designed to be simple, readable, and unambiguous.
• It’s mainly used in Python, Rust, Go, and other ecosystems for project or tool configuration.
• It uses a structure of key-value pairs, tables, and arrays.

Notes:

pyproject.toml replaces older setup.py and requirements.txt for many modern Python projects. The requirements.txt, you list them in the [tool.poetry.dependencies] or other dependency sections in TOML format.

requirements.txt:

fastapi==0.100.0
uvicorn[standard]==0.22.0
requests>=2.28

becomes in pyproject.toml:

toml:
[tool.poetry.dependencies]
python = "^3.11"
fastapi = "0.100.0"
uvicorn = { version = "0.22.0", extras = ["standard"] }
requests = ">=2.28"

You can export a requirements.txt from pyproject.toml if needed (for example using poetry export).