Config Files

Overview¶

The cognesy/instructor-struct package works without any published configuration files. All structured-output behavior is controlled through typed configuration objects in code.

When configuration files are present in a project, they typically serve the companion Polyglot package (provider presets) rather than the structured-output package itself.

Provider Presets¶

LLM provider connections are configured through YAML preset files managed by the cognesy/polyglot package. Each preset defines the API URL, driver, model, token limits, and other provider-specific settings:

packages/polyglot/resources/config/llm/presets/
    openai.yaml
    anthropic.yaml
    gemini.yaml
    groq.yaml
    ...

You load a preset with LLMConfig::fromPreset():

use Cognesy\Polyglot\Inference\Config\LLMConfig;

$config = LLMConfig::fromPreset('openai');

The preset resolution searches several paths automatically (project config/ directory, monorepo paths, and Composer vendor paths), so presets work out of the box in most setups.

Configuration Groups¶

In the broader InstructorPHP ecosystem, configuration is organized into groups. Each group is stored in a separate file. The main groups are:

Group	Purpose
`llm`	LLM provider connections and presets
`structured`	Structured output behavior (output mode, retries, prompts)
`embed`	Embedding provider connections
`http`	HTTP client configurations
`prompt`	Prompt libraries and settings
`web`	Web service providers (scrapers, etc.)
`debug`	Debugging settings

The structured-output package only consumes the structured and llm groups. Other groups belong to companion packages.

Structured Output Configuration¶

Rather than reading from config files, the structured-output package uses the StructuredOutputConfig class directly:

use Cognesy\Instructor\Config\StructuredOutputConfig;
use Cognesy\Instructor\Enums\OutputMode;

$config = new StructuredOutputConfig(
    outputMode: OutputMode::Tools,
    maxRetries: 2,
    toolName: 'extract_data',
);

This keeps the package independent from any file-based configuration system while still allowing integration with one when needed (via fromArray() or fromDsn()).