instructor/docs/index.md

Instructor

Structured outputs powered by llms. Designed for simplicity, transparency, and control.

---

Instructor stands out for its simplicity, transparency, and user-centric design. We leverage Pydantic to do the heavy lifting, and we've built a simple, easy-to-use API on top of it by helping you manage validation context, retries with Tenacity, and streaming Lists and Partial responses.

Check us out in Typescript and Elixir.

!!! tip "Not limited to the OpenAI API"

Instructor is not limited to the OpenAI API, we have support for many other backends that via patching. Check out more on [patching](./concepts/patching.md).

1. Wrap OpenAI's SDK
2. Wrap the create method

Including but not limited to:

- [Together](./hub/together.md)
- [Ollama](./hub/ollama.md)
- [AnyScale](./hub/anyscale.md)
- [llama-cpp-python](./hub/llama-cpp-python.md)

Usage

import instructor
from openai import OpenAI
from pydantic import BaseModel

# This enables response_model keyword
# from client.chat.completions.create
client = instructor.patch(OpenAI())


class UserDetail(BaseModel):
    name: str
    age: int


user = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-3.5-turbo",
    response_model=UserDetail,
    messages=[
        {"role": "user", "content": "Extract Jason is 25 years old"},
    ],
)

assert isinstance(user, UserDetail)
assert user.name == "Jason"
assert user.age == 25
print(user.model_dump_json(indent=2))
"""
{
  "name": "Jason",
  "age": 25
}
"""

Using async clients

For async clients you must use apatch vs patch like so:

import asyncio
import instructor
from openai import AsyncOpenAI
from pydantic import BaseModel

aclient = instructor.apatch(AsyncOpenAI())


class UserExtract(BaseModel):
    name: str
    age: int


task = aclient.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-3.5-turbo",
    response_model=UserExtract,
    messages=[
        {"role": "user", "content": "Extract jason is 25 years old"},
    ],
)

response = asyncio.run(task)
print(response.model_dump_json(indent=2))
"""
{
  "name": "Jason",
  "age": 25
}
"""

!!! note "Accessing the original response and usage tokens"

If you want to access anything like usage or other metadata, the original response is available on the `Model._raw_response` attribute.

```python
import openai
import instructor
from pydantic import BaseModel

client = instructor.patch(openai.OpenAI())


class UserDetail(BaseModel):
    name: str
    age: int


user = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-3.5-turbo",
    response_model=UserDetail,
    messages=[
        {"role": "user", "content": "Extract Jason is 25 years old"},
    ],
)

print(user._raw_response.model_dump_json(indent=2))
"""
{
  "id": "chatcmpl-8u9e2TV3ehCgLsRxNLLeAbzpEmBuZ",
  "choices": [
    {
      "finish_reason": "stop",
      "index": 0,
      "logprobs": null,
      "message": {
        "content": null,
        "role": "assistant",
        "function_call": null,
        "tool_calls": [
          {
            "id": "call_3ZuQhfteTLEy7CUokjwnLBHr",
            "function": {
              "arguments": "{\"name\":\"Jason\",\"age\":25}",
              "name": "UserDetail"
            },
            "type": "function"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  ],
  "created": 1708394134,
  "model": "gpt-3.5-turbo-0125",
  "object": "chat.completion",
  "system_fingerprint": "fp_69829325d0",
  "usage": {
    "completion_tokens": 9,
    "prompt_tokens": 81,
    "total_tokens": 90
  }
}
"""
```

Why use Instructor?

The question of using Instructor is fundamentally a question of why to use Pydantic.

1. Powered by type hints — Instructor is powered by Pydantic, which is powered by type hints. Schema validation, prompting is controlled by type annotations; less to learn, less code to write, and integrates with your IDE.

2. Powered by OpenAI — Instructor is powered by OpenAI's function calling API. This means you can use the same API for both prompting and extraction.

3. Customizable — Pydantic is highly customizable. You can define your own validators, custom error messages, and more.

4. Ecosystem Pydantic is the most widely used data validation library for Python. It's used by FastAPI, Typer, and many other popular libraries.

5. Battle Tested — Pydantic is downloaded over 100M times per month, and supported by a large community of contributors.

6. Easy Integration with CLI - We offer a variety of CLI tools like instructor jobs, instructor files and instructor usage to track your OpenAI usage, fine-tuning jobs and more, just check out our CLI Documentation to find out more.

More Examples

If you'd like to see more check out our cookbook.

Installing Instructor is a breeze. Just run pip install instructor.

Contributing

If you want to help out, checkout some of the issues marked as good-first-issue or help-wanted. Found here. They could be anything from code improvements, a guest blog post, or a new cook book.

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT License.