The vast majority of PHP applications out there use native PHP files for configuration. One or more standard PHP files declares a number of variables used for configuration. Given the syntax constraints of PHP - e.g. you can’t put a quote inside quoted values - a culture of developers insisting on managing config files is pretty much standard. But it doesn’t have to be.
YAML, or YAML Ain’t Markup Language, is a “human friendly data serialization standard”. It’s essentially a very basic format for storing data, and uses far less syntax than standard PHP. Here’s a sample of YAML:
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