Azure OpenAI

OpenAI-compatible capabilities hosted inside your Azure subscription. Use it when data must stay in your Azure tenant or when you already manage Azure OpenAI deployments. Unlike the public OpenAI provider, every model reference is a deployment name you created in the Azure portal — the public model id never appears in calls.

Capabilities

Text with streaming, image generation, and embeddings, plus file storage and file-backed stores. Provider tools: code execution, file search, tool search, and web search (details).

Configuration

Configure via environment variables. config/ai.php only forwards them with env() — set the values in .env or the host environment, never hardcode keys in the config file.

// In config/ai.php
return [
    'Ai' => [
        'providers' => [
            'azure' => [
                'className' => 'Crustum\Ai\Providers\AzureOpenAiProvider',
                'key' => env('AZURE_OPENAI_API_KEY'),
                'url' => env('AZURE_OPENAI_URL'),
                'api_version' => env('AZURE_OPENAI_API_VERSION', '2025-04-01-preview'),
                'deployment' => env('AZURE_OPENAI_DEPLOYMENT', 'gpt-6-sol'),
                'image_deployment' => env('AZURE_OPENAI_IMAGE_DEPLOYMENT', 'gpt-image-2.5-flare'),
                'embedding_deployment' => env('AZURE_OPENAI_EMBEDDING_DEPLOYMENT', 'text-embedding-3-small'),
                'models' => [
                    'embeddings' => [
                        'dimensions' => (int)env('AZURE_OPENAI_EMBEDDINGS_DIMENSIONS', 1536),
                    ],
                ],
            ],
        ],
    ],
];

Config key	Env var	Purpose
className	—	Provider class. Keep the default unless subclassing.
key (apiKey also accepted)	AZURE_OPENAI_API_KEY	Azure resource key. Required.
url	AZURE_OPENAI_URL	Your Azure OpenAI resource endpoint (e.g. https://<resource>.openai.azure.com/openai/deployments/...). Required — there is no public default.
api_version	AZURE_OPENAI_API_VERSION	Azure REST API version pinned to your resource. Keep the default unless Azure requires a newer one.
deployment	AZURE_OPENAI_DEPLOYMENT	Text/chat deployment name. Also serves the cheapest and smartest tiers for this provider.
image_deployment	AZURE_OPENAI_IMAGE_DEPLOYMENT	Image deployment name.
embedding_deployment	AZURE_OPENAI_EMBEDDING_DEPLOYMENT	Embeddings deployment name.
models.embeddings.dimensions	AZURE_OPENAI_EMBEDDINGS_DIMENSIONS	Vector width of the embeddings deployment. Must match the deployed model.
headers	— (config only)	Extra HTTP headers merged into every request. Add as a plain array if needed.

Text tier note: unlike other providers, Azure reads all three text tiers from the single deployment key — set per-call model: to a deployment name to target a different deployment.

Notes

Every model reference is a deployment name you created in the Azure portal; the public model id never appears in calls.

See also

• Providers — capability matrix
• OpenAI — the public-endpoint counterpart