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Python class

MAXConfig

MAXConfig

class max.pipelines.lib.MAXConfig

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Bases: object

Abstract base class for all MAX configs.

There are some invariants that MAXConfig classes should follow:

• All config classes should be dataclasses.
• All config classes should have a help() method that returns a dictionary of config options and their descriptions.
• All config classes dataclass fields should have default values, and hence can be trivially initialized via cls().
• All config classes should be frozen (except KVCacheConfig for now), to avoid accidental modification of config objects.
• All config classes must have mutually exclusive dataclass fields among themselves.
• All config classes must define a _config_file_section_name class attribute specifying their expected configuration section name.

cli_arg_parsers()

cli_arg_parsers(choices_provider=None, description=None, formatter_class=None, required_params=None)

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Creates an ArgumentParser populated with all config fields.

Builds a parser with add_argument() calls for each field, using the loaded config values as defaults. Arguments are automatically grouped by their group metadata from field definitions. The parser’s parse_args() method is wrapped to convert parsed string values back to their proper types (for example, enum objects) using MAXConfig type conversion logic.

Parameters:

• choices_provider (dict[str, list[str]] | None) – A dictionary mapping field names to their valid choices. Allows external code to specify choices for specific fields. Defaults to None.
• description (str | None) – A description for the argument parser. Defaults to None.
• formatter_class (type[HelpFormatter] | None) – A formatter class for the argument parser, forwarded to the argparse.ArgumentParser constructor. Defaults to None.
• required_params (set[str] | None) – A set of field names that should be marked as required in the argument parser, regardless of their default values. Defaults to None.

Returns:

A configured ArgumentParser with an enhanced parse_args() method that:

• Uses loaded config values as argument defaults.
• Converts parsed values to proper types (enums and similar).
• Groups arguments by field metadata for better organization.
• Maintains compatibility with standard argparse usage.

Return type:

ArgumentParser

Build a parser from a config instance and parse a list of arguments, restricting a field to a set of valid choices:

from dataclasses import dataclass

from max.config import MAXConfig

@dataclass
class MyServerConfig(MAXConfig):
    backend: str = "modular"

    @staticmethod
    def help() -> dict[str, str]:
        return {"backend": "Serving backend to use."}

config = MyServerConfig()
parser = config.cli_arg_parsers(
    choices_provider={"backend": ["modular", "vllm"]},
)
args = parser.parse_args(["--backend", "vllm"])

from_config_file()

classmethod from_config_file(config_path, section_name=None)

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Loads configuration from a YAML file.

Supports both individual config files and comprehensive multi-config files. For comprehensive files, automatically detects the appropriate section based on class name.

Parameters:

• config_path (str | Path) – The path to the YAML configuration file.
• section_name (str | None) – The section name for comprehensive configs. Auto-detected if None. Defaults to None.

Returns:

A config instance with parameters loaded from the file.

Raises:

• FileNotFoundError – If the config file does not exist.
• ValueError – If the configuration is invalid.

Return type:

T

Define a config subclass, then load its values from a YAML file:

from dataclasses import dataclass
from pathlib import Path
from tempfile import TemporaryDirectory

from max.config import MAXConfig

@dataclass
class MyCacheConfig(MAXConfig):
    page_size: int = 128

    @staticmethod
    def help() -> dict[str, str]:
        return {"page_size": "Number of tokens per KV cache page."}

with TemporaryDirectory() as tmp_dir:
    config_path = Path(tmp_dir) / "my_cache.yaml"
    config_path.write_text("page_size: 256")
    config = MyCacheConfig.from_config_file(config_path)

get_default_field_choices()

static get_default_field_choices()

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Get default valid choices for fields that have constrained values.

Returns:

Dictionary mapping field names to their valid choices.

Return type:

dict[str, list[str]]

get_default_required_fields()

classmethod get_default_required_fields()

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Get default required fields for the config.

Return type:

set[str]

help()

abstract static help()

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Returns a dictionary of config options and their descriptions.

Return type:

dict[str, str]