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Inspect your runnables

Once you create a runnable with LCEL, you may often want to inspect it to get a better sense for what is going on. This notebook covers some methods for doing so.

First, let’s create an example LCEL. We will create one that does retrieval

%pip install --upgrade --quiet  langchain langchain-openai faiss-cpu tiktoken
from langchain_community.vectorstores import FAISS
from langchain_core.output_parsers import StrOutputParser
from langchain_core.prompts import ChatPromptTemplate
from langchain_core.runnables import RunnablePassthrough
from langchain_openai import ChatOpenAI, OpenAIEmbeddings
vectorstore = FAISS.from_texts(
    ["harrison worked at kensho"], embedding=OpenAIEmbeddings()
)
retriever = vectorstore.as_retriever()

template = """Answer the question based only on the following context:
{context}

Question: {question}
"""
prompt = ChatPromptTemplate.from_template(template)

model = ChatOpenAI()
chain = (
    {"context": retriever, "question": RunnablePassthrough()}
    | prompt
    | model
    | StrOutputParser()
)

Get a graph​

You can get a graph of the runnable

chain.get_graph()

While that is not super legible, you can print it to get a display that’s easier to understand

chain.get_graph().print_ascii()
           +---------------------------------+         
           | Parallel<context,question>Input |         
           +---------------------------------+         
                    **               **                
                 ***                   ***             
               **                         **           
+----------------------+              +-------------+  
| VectorStoreRetriever |              | Passthrough |  
+----------------------+              +-------------+  
                    **               **                
                      ***         ***                  
                         **     **                     
           +----------------------------------+        
           | Parallel<context,question>Output |        
           +----------------------------------+        
                             *                         
                             *                         
                             *                         
                  +--------------------+               
                  | ChatPromptTemplate |               
                  +--------------------+               
                             *                         
                             *                         
                             *                         
                      +------------+                   
                      | ChatOpenAI |                   
                      +------------+                   
                             *                         
                             *                         
                             *                         
                   +-----------------+                 
                   | StrOutputParser |                 
                   +-----------------+                 
                             *                         
                             *                         
                             *                         
                +-----------------------+              
                | StrOutputParserOutput |              
                +-----------------------+

Get the prompts​

An important part of every chain is the prompts that are used. You can get the prompts present in the chain:

chain.get_prompts()
[ChatPromptTemplate(input_variables=['context', 'question'], messages=[HumanMessagePromptTemplate(prompt=PromptTemplate(input_variables=['context', 'question'], template='Answer the question based only on the following context:\n{context}\n\nQuestion: {question}\n'))])]

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