A configuration file is a list of command necessary to properly configure your detector systems, with default valuee for some parameters and other settings that the users should normally not change dinamically.
For this reason most of the commands present in the configuration file cannot be modified when using the API.
The syntax of the configuration file is exactly the same as in the comman line interface, therefore you can refere to that documentation to edit the files.
The configuration files look different for the different detector types. Examples of configuration files can be found in the examples directory.