Defining Parameters in YAML and in the REST API

Parameters in pipeline YAML are the init parameters you can specify for the nodes, either when creating a pipeline in deepset Cloud or when uploading a ready-made YAML through a REST API endpoint.

Runtime parameters in the REST API are request body parameters you define when making a request with the Search REST API endpoint. You can configure these parameters for all the nodes in the pipeline, or you can target specific nodes. See the reference documentation for a particular node in this section to check the parameters you can modify. If there are no REST API parameters listed for a node, it means you can't define any runtime parameters for it.

Passing YAML Parameters

You customize these parameters in the components section of the YAML, in the params object for a particular node, like this:

components:
  - name: componentName
    type: componentType
    params:
      param1: value1
      param2: value2

The name is a custom name you give to a pipeline node. The type is the class this node belongs to. You can check the class in a particular node's documentation.

Examples

This example shows how to customize the DocumentStore and EmbeddingRetriever in the YAML:

components:
  - name: DocumentStore
    type: DeepsetCloudDocumentStore 
    params:
      embedding_dim: 768
      similarity: cosine
  - name: EmbeddingRetriever 
    type: EmbeddingRetriever 
    params:
      document_store: DocumentStore
      model_format: sentence_transformers
      embedding_model: intfloat/e5-base-v2 
      top_k: 20 
      ...

For more examples, see Pipeline Examples, Pipeline Nodes, and About Pipelines.

Passing Runtime Parameters to the REST API

You can pass runtime parameters to influence the behavior of nodes in a pipeline when it's executed. To do this, pass the name of the node whose parameter you want to change together with the dictionary of the parameters, like this:

payload = {
    "params": {
        "node_name":{
          "param1": value1,
          "param2": value2
        },
    },
}

You can also do this for multiple nodes at once. Simply pass the names of the nodes and the parameters you want to modify:

payload = {
    "params": {
        "node1_name":{
          "param1": value1,
          "param2": value2
        },
        "node2_name":{
          "param": value
        },
        "node3_name":{
          "param3": value3
        },
    },
}

To pass a parameter to all nodes in a pipeline, use the parameter name and value without listing node names:

payload = {
    "params": {
        "param": value,
        "param2": value2
    }
}

The parameters are applied to all nodes that accept them and are ignored for all other nodes.

Examples

Customizing a Single Node

In this example, we're changing the EmbeddingRetriever's top_k parameter that determines the number of documents the retriever fetches from the document store:

payload = {
    "debug": True,
    "params": {
        "EmbeddingRetriever":{
          "top_k": 2
        },
    },
    "queries": ["Where does Horned sungem live?"]
}

Customizing Multiple Nodes

This example passes different parameters to the EmbeddingRetriever, Reranker, and PromptNode nodes:

payload = {
    "debug": True,
    "params": {
        "EmbeddingRetriever":{
          "top_k": 10
        },
        "Reranker":{
          "top_k": 4
        },
        "PromptNode":{
          "max_tokens": 500
        },
    },
    "queries": ["Where does Horned sungem live?"]
}