`ComponentTool` is a Tool that wraps Haystack components, allowing them to be used as tools by LLMs. ComponentTool automatically generates LLM-compatible tool schemas from component input sockets, which are derived from the component's `run` method signature and type hints.
It does input type conversion and offers support for components with run methods that have the following input types:
- Basic types (str, int, float, bool, dict)
- Dataclasses (both simple and nested structures)
- Lists of basic types (such as List[str])
- Lists of dataclasses (such as List[Document])
- Parameters with mixed types (such as List[Document], str...)
### Parameters
- `component` is mandatory and needs to be a Haystack component, either an existing one or a custom component.
- `name` is optional and defaults to the name of the component written in snake case, for example, "serper_dev_web_search" for SerperDevWebSearch.
- `description` is optional and defaults to the component’s docstring. It’s the description that explains to the LLM what the tool can be used for.
## Usage
Installthe additional dependencies `docstring-parser` and `jsonschema`package to use the`ComponentTool`:
```shell
pip install docstring-parser jsonschema
```
### In a pipeline
You can create a `ComponentTool` from an existing `SerperDevWebSearch` component and let an `OpenAIChatGenerator` use it as a tool in a pipeline.
```python
from haystack import component, Pipeline
from haystack.tools import ComponentTool
from haystack.components.websearch import SerperDevWebSearch
from haystack.utils import Secret
from haystack.components.tools.tool_invoker import ToolInvoker
from haystack.components.generators.chat import OpenAIChatGenerator
You can use `ComponentTool` with the [Agent](../pipeline-components/agents-1/agent.mdx) component. Internally, the `Agent` component includes a `ToolInvoker` and the ChatGenerator of your choice to execute tool calls and process tool results.
