Introduction

DeepSeek Harness (DSH) is an OpenAI-compatible adapter whose configuration is primarily managed through the settings.yaml file. The DSH model page only edits common fields such as endpoints, credentials, and model lists. Many critical configurations that determine whether requests succeed—such as retry strategies, timeout settings, request headers, User-Agent, and specific reasoning parameters—are hidden in the YAML file and cannot be operated directly through the interface.

The core philosophy of DSH is “everything is a plugin.” The dsh-advanced-provider-settings plugin aims to solve this pain point. It exposes these hidden configuration items through the WebUI, allowing fine-grained management of Providers without directly editing the YAML file.

Plugin Overview

This is a WebUI plugin maintained by misswell. It injects UI through DeepSeek Harness extension slots and directly operates settings in the llm-pi-ai namespace, providing graphical management of Provider-level configuration. The plugin uses DeepSeek Harness’s built-in revision-fenced settings transport for secure writes, ensuring that comments and unmodified fields in the configuration file remain intact.

Core Features

The plugin supports multi-dimensional configuration from model level to Provider level:

  1. Thinking Level Mapping
    Supports full-level configurations such as off, minimal, low, medium, high, xhigh, and max. You can set a routing default level, configure level mappings for each model individually, and set the Token budget for each level.

  2. Third-Party DeepSeek Endpoint Configuration
    For third-party endpoints with domains other than deepseek.com (such as self-hosted vLLM or cloud gateways), it allows manual declaration of dialect, reasoning effort, and correction of the max_tokens field spelling, ensuring the request format meets endpoint requirements.

  3. Model-Level Channel Editing
    Different editing channels are used for route-level models lists and catalog routing. Catalog routing can use modelOverrides to edit display names, context windows, and maximum output tokens.

  4. Provider-Level Configuration
    Provides global and single-Provider request header settings, User-Agent presets (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc.), retry policies (presets or custom), timeout settings, transport methods, Vision image budgets, and 26 compatibility flags.

  5. Secure Write Mechanism
    Through the revision-fenced settings transport, the plugin securely writes configuration to the YAML file without modifying Harness source code, scraping the DOM, or modifying node_modules.

Installation and Enablement

Installing this plugin requires Node.js version >= 20.

dsh plugin add github:misswell/dsh-advanced-provider-settings

After installation, the plugin is automatically injected into the DSH Web UI and displays corresponding editing entry points in the model list and provider cards.

Typical Usage

The plugin is mainly applied in the following scenarios:

  1. Connecting to Third-Party DeepSeek Endpoints
    When pointing DSH to a non-official domain (such as a company proxy or self-hosted gateway), the plugin allows you to explicitly declare thinkingFormat as deepseek, set the reasoning level, and correct field spelling (such as using max_tokens instead of OpenAI’s max_completion_tokens), so that you can preview and ensure correct formatting before sending requests.

  2. Catalog Routing Model Overrides
    If a route references an installed catalog, the plugin allows you to use modelOverrides to adjust display names, context window sizes, and maximum output tokens for specific models.

  3. Meeting Gateway Whitelist Requirements
    Some gateway clients have whitelist restrictions. The User-Agent presets provided by the plugin (such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox) can satisfy gateway requirements for client identification.

Applicable Scenarios and Notes

  • Version Compatibility: The current version of the plugin is v0.4.7 and has been validated against DeepSeek Harness 0.2.0-rc.2 and 0.2.1-alpha.4.
  • Permissions and Security: The plugin runs in the context of the DSH process. Before installation, you should check its source code and license (MIT).
  • Functional Scope: The plugin focuses on general Provider-level configuration and does not directly edit sensitive information such as credential management.

Conclusion

dsh-advanced-provider-settings fills a gap in DeepSeek Harness’s configuration management. It translates deep YAML configurations into a visual operations panel, lowers the barrier to integrating with third-party DeepSeek endpoints, and improves debugging and maintenance efficiency.