# Configuration

Use the following reference guides to understand Weaviate's core concepts and configurations. These guides cover collection definitions, data types, distance metrics, environment variables, and more to help you optimize your Weaviate deployment.

::::card-grid
:::card{title="Collection definition" href="/guides/reference-configuration-collections" icon="box"}
An overview of all top-level collection parameters and concepts.
:::

:::card{title="Vector Index" href="/guides/reference-configuration-indexing-vector-index" icon="network"}
Tune HNSW, Flat, or Dynamic indexes to balance search speed and recall.
:::

:::card{title="Inverted Index" href="/guides/reference-configuration-indexing-inverted-index" icon="filter"}
Optimize filtering and keyword search with BM25, stopwords, and other settings.
:::

:::card{title="Data Types" href="/guides/reference-configuration-datatypes" icon="list"}
Reference for supported data types and their handling in Weaviate.
:::

:::card{title="Distance Metrics" href="/guides/reference-configuration-distances" icon="ruler"}
Learn about the distance metrics used for similarity calculations.
:::

:::card{title="Environment Variables" href="/guides/database-configuration-overview" icon="settings"}
Learn about the environment variables used for configuration.
:::
::::

:::callout{intent="info" title="Deployment documentation"}
For deployment related topics like security, backups, replication, cluster information and advanced configuration options, visit the [deployment documentation](../deploy-config/overview.md).
:::

## Related pages

- [Agents](./agents-index.md)
- [AI-assisted Weaviate code generation](./ai-assisted-vibe-coding-index.md)
- [APIs](./apis-index.md)
- [Authorization and authentication](./authorization-and-authentication-index.md)
- [Benchmarks](./benchmarks-index.md)
- [Best practices](./best-practices-index.md)
- [Client libraries](./clients-index.md)
- [Client Libraries / SDKs](./client-libraries-index.md)
- [Cloud](./cloud-index.md)
- [Cloud account management](./cloud-account-management-index.md)

# Agent Instructions

This portal answers questions programmatically. To receive a synthesized,
source-cited answer instead of crawling page by page, append the `?ask=`
query parameter to any page URL on this site:

    /guides/quickstart?ask=how+do+I+authenticate

Optional parameters:

- `&goal=<what-you-are-trying-to-do>` steers the answer toward your
  objective (e.g. `&goal=write+a+python+client`).
- `&version=<label>` scopes the answer to a mounted version when the
  portal publishes more than one.

The response is `text/markdown`: the answer followed by a `# Sources` list
of the portal pages it was grounded in. Status codes are the contract:

- `200` — the answer; `402` — the portal owner’s plan or answer credits are
  exhausted (surface this to your operator; do NOT retry); `429` — you are
  rate-limited; back off for the `Retry-After` seconds; `503` — the answer
  lane is temporarily unavailable; fall back to crawling the `.md` pages.

For the full corpus map read `llms.txt` at the site root; for the tool
surface (search + page fetch as MCP tools) see `/mcp`.