I made a simplest configuration file format for anyone

Hi there,

I would like to ask for your opinion about my project. Currently, I made a simplest as possible configuration file format. It’s called VARL (Variable List) and it looks like this:

server name = varl.org
host        = 127.0.0.1
port        = [80, 443]
daemonize   = true
SSL Cert    = /home/secrets/bundle.cert

routes = {
    home   = /
    login  = /auth/login
    signup = /auth/register
}

The reason why I made this because the available configuration format including TOML and YAML still complicated. At the other hand, the INI format is simple but informal, so this can be a problematic on different program. Therefore, we need a better configuration format that combines those advantages into a simple standardized format.

I have documented VARL standard on GitHub. Here’s the link:

Currently, the implementation is available on JavaScript. Anyone can adopt VARL on any programming language.

It’s an interesting idea, but I don’t know that you’ll dethrone YAML. Why do you think YAML is complicated? I’ve found it pretty straightforward, personally.

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Thanks for your response Jeremy. I know it sounds silly to make another standard, but at least people can choose for more simple approach in terms of structure. Besides of that, I have no intention to dethrone YAML. It has nice structure as example:

local:
    api:
        subdomain: api
        local_ip: 192.168.4.3
    web:
        subdomain: @
        local_ip:192.168.4.2
        route:
            home: /
            login: /account/login
            register: /account/register
domain: mydomain.me
maintain_mode: false

However the only indicator of object data type is indented value which makes indentation isn’t cosmetic anymore. So the number of spaces for indentation must consistent.

Before I start to think of VARL concept, I did some research about most of configuration file format on the internet and I found

https://www.arp242.net/yaml-config.html

I like whitespace being important, but I get that not everyone does.

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