Graph retrieval tied plain vector search at best and never beat it. Measured
across five corpora, the bottleneck was seeding, not the graph: the walk
started from nodes whose embeddings were computed from bare entity names, and
a whole question shares almost nothing with a name like "Quill".
Extraction now embeds each node from "name (type): description" and each
relationship as the fact it asserts ("Alder streams_to Quill: ..."), stored on
a new nullable graph_edges.fact_embedding column that ensure_vector_schema adds
in place. Entity names are canonicalised (case, punctuation, word breaks and a
cautious plural) so "VECTOR_STORE" and "vector stores" land on one node. Extraction calls run
concurrently (GRAPHRAG_EXTRACTION_WORKERS, default 8) while embedding and graph
writes stay serial on the task thread, so ordering and idempotency are
unchanged; that measured 8.4x faster with identical output.
Retrieval gains per-source options, stored under retrieval.graph and read live
at query time:
- seed_strategy: start from matching entities (default) or matching
relationships, which can reach an entity the question never names;
- passage_nodes (on): walk the source's passages alongside entities, with
PageRank damping 0.5 instead of 0.85;
- blend_vector (on): fuse the graph ranking with the source's vector ranking
by reciprocal rank.
The defaults are the measured-best configuration. Through GraphRAGRetriever,
the new seeding moved recall@4 from 0.41 to 0.68 on a multi-hop corpus and
from 0.50 to 1.00 on the docs corpus, and regressed none of the corpora
measured. Existing graphs keep name-only embeddings until rebuilt.
Review follow-up. The per-group secret validators normalised a hand-picked
list of API keys, which left other optional credentials and overrides
(OPEN_ROUTER_API_KEY, S3 and Daytona keys, ELASTIC_PASSWORD, the OIDC
trio, connector client ids, MICROSOFT_AUTHORITY, MCP_OAUTH_REDIRECT_URI)
holding the literal "None" or "" a .env file spells "unset" with, so
truthiness checks and fallbacks downstream saw a value. One rule on the
group base replaces those lists: every Optional[str] field maps "", "None"
and whitespace to None and strips real values. Plain str fields are left
alone. The OIDC required-settings check therefore also rejects those
spellings.
EMBEDDINGS_POOLING is Literal["cls", "mean"] with case-insensitive
parsing; its consumer silently ignored anything else.
Bounds added where the consumer rejects or misbehaves on the value:
SCHEDULE_RUN_OUTPUT_RETENTION_DAYS and MESSAGE_EVENTS_RETENTION_DAYS (the
cleanup repositories raise on <= 0), EMBEDDINGS_DELEGATE_TIMEOUT, the
remote-device idle/pairing/invocation TTLs and CELERY_VISIBILITY_TIMEOUT
(> 0), REMOTE_DEVICE_CMD_QUEUE_TTL_SECONDS (> 605, the documented drain
deadline), GRAPHRAG_MAX_CHUNKS_FOR_EXTRACTION (>= 0; negative would slice
the pending list from the end).
The generated reference now renders generic type arguments
(dict[str, int] rather than dict).
SAGEMAKER_REGION, SAGEMAKER_ACCESS_KEY and SAGEMAKER_SECRET_KEY survive
only as a fallback for the S3_* credentials. They carry
Field(deprecated=...) now, so any read emits a DeprecationWarning naming
the replacement and the generated reference shows the notice. The S3
store is the one sanctioned reader; it silences that warning locally
because it already logs its own operator-facing one when the fallback
is actually used.
DEFAULT_MAX_HISTORY was referenced nowhere. RETRIEVERS_ENABLED was read by
no code at all, while two docs pages described it as an enforced
allow-list; both the setting and those claims are removed.
Enum-like settings whose allowed values were only listed in a comment are
now Literal types, so a typo fails at startup with a message naming the
allowed values instead of falling through to a default with a warning
(or, for VECTOR_STORE, failing on first use):
AUTH_TYPE, VECTOR_STORE, STORAGE_TYPE, URL_STRATEGY, OCR_BACKEND,
OCR_ENGINE, SANDBOX_BACKEND, DOC_PARSER_ENGINE, TTS_PROVIDER, STT_PROVIDER
Each keeps a before-validator that strips and lower-cases the value, since
the registries that consume them already lower-cased at the use site, and
AUTH_TYPE maps the "None"/"none"/"" spellings a .env file carries to None
(it was the string "None" before, which only worked because nothing
compared against it). An empty TTS/STT provider still means "off".
LLM_PROVIDER stays a plain str because providers are plugin-extensible.
Containers are typed (dict[str, int], list[str], dict[str, Any]) instead
of bare dict/list, six fields that were Optional with a non-None default
are plain, and integer settings whose description already states a range
carry it as a constraint (ge=0 for "0 disables", ge=1 for counts that
cannot be zero, 0 < threshold <= 1).
docsgpt/core/settings.py had grown to 258 fields in one 600-line class,
touched by about two commits a week, with related settings scattered
(GitHub ingest caps inside the embeddings block, API keys in four places,
the OpenAI Responses knobs 100 lines from the other OpenAI fields).
It is now a package: one module per domain (auth, llm, embeddings,
retrieval, vectorstores, database, workers, ingestion, ocr, storage,
connectors, server, events, agents, guardrails, scheduler, sandbox,
speech), each a SettingsGroup owning its fields and validators, composed
by multiple inheritance into the same flat Settings class. Every
attribute name, type, default, alias and constraint is unchanged, so
settings.NAME reads, .env files and test monkeypatches all keep working;
the import path docsgpt.core.settings is the package. Settings.normalize_api_key
is kept as a classmethod for callers that reuse it.
The comment above or beside each field became its Field(description=...),
so the definitions are visible to tooling; the next commit generates the
docs reference from them.
Pitfall recorded for future groups: pydantic collects validators by
method name across the MRO, so two groups naming a validator the same
would silently keep only one. Each group's validator has a unique name.
Alex