Configuration file

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Configuration files are a common way that programs describe application preferences or allow a user to customize a program's options that they want to use, so you can think of a configuration file as analogous to a graphical program's Preferences, Settings, or Options screen. Configuration files are almost always plain text files structured in well-defined ways that the program they are intended to configure is pre-programmed to expect. Confusingly, there are many syntactic and stylistic differences between one program's configuration file structure and another's, despite many attempts at standardization over the years. Not even the filename extension is standardized, although extensions like .conf, .config, .cfg, and .ini are among the most common.