Carbon.txt validator

This validator reads carbon.txt files, and validates them against a spec defined on http://carbontxt.org.

Usage

With the CLI

Run a validation against a given domain, or file, say if the file is valid TOML, and it confirms to the carbon.txt spec.

The following commands assume you are working in a virtual environment:

# parse the carbon.txt file on default paths on some-domain.com
carbon-txt validate domain some-domain.com

# parse a remote file available at https://somedomain.com/path-to-carbon.txt
carbon-txt validate file https://somedomain.com/path-to-carbon.txt

# parse a local file ./path-to-file.com
carbon-txt validate file ./path-to-file.com

# pipe the contents of a file into the file validation command as part of a pipeline
cat ./path-to-file.com | carbontxt validate file

Using UV

If you are not using virtual environments directly, you can use it with uv, which is the recommended way to run the project.

Add carbon-txt to a project with uv add:

uv add carbon-txt

You can now run the command line tool with uv run carbon-txt

Running outside a project

If you have uv installed, you can run the command line tool like so:

# check a file
uv tool run carbon-txt validate ./path/to/file

# run a server
uv tool run carbon-txt serve

This will download the latest published version from pypi and run the corresponding CLI command

With the HTTP API

You can also validate carbon.txt files sent over an HTTP API.

# run the carbon-txt validator as a server using the default django server. Not for production
carbon-txt serve

For production, Granian, a performant webserver is bundled. Pass the flag --server granian to use it.

# run the carbon-txt validator as a server using the production granian server
carbon-txt serve --server granian