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Chat with an OpenAI-compatible model

Source: R/provider-openai-compatible.R
chat_openai_compatible.Rd

This function is for use with OpenAI-compatible APIs, also known as the chat completions API. If you want to use OpenAI itself, we recommend chat_openai(), which uses the newer responses API.

Many providers offer OpenAI-compatible APIs, including:

  • Ollama for local models

  • vLLM for self-hosted models

  • Various cloud providers with OpenAI-compatible endpoints

Usage

chat_openai_compatible(
  base_url,
  name = "OpenAI-compatible",
  system_prompt = NULL,
  api_key = NULL,
  credentials = NULL,
  model = NULL,
  params = NULL,
  api_args = list(),
  api_headers = character(),
  echo = c("none", "output", "all")
)

Arguments

base_url

The base URL to the endpoint. This parameter is required since there is no default for OpenAI-compatible APIs.

name

The name of the provider; this is shown in token_usage() and is used to compute costs.

system_prompt

A system prompt to set the behavior of the assistant.

api_key

[Deprecated] Use credentials instead.

credentials

Credentials to use for authentication. If not provided, will attempt to use the OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable.

model

The model to use for chat. No default; depends on your provider.

params

Common model parameters, usually created by params().

api_args

Named list of arbitrary extra arguments appended to the body of every chat API call. Combined with the body object generated by ellmer with modifyList().

api_headers

Named character vector of arbitrary extra headers appended to every chat API call.

echo

One of the following options:

  • none: don't emit any output (default when running in a function).

  • output: echo text and tool-calling output as it streams in (default when running at the console).

  • all: echo all input and output.

Note this only affects the chat() method.

Value

A Chat object.

See also

Other chatbots: chat_anthropic(), chat_aws_bedrock(), chat_azure_openai(), chat_cloudflare(), chat_databricks(), chat_deepseek(), chat_github(), chat_google_gemini(), chat_groq(), chat_huggingface(), chat_mistral(), chat_ollama(), chat_openai(), chat_openrouter(), chat_perplexity(), chat_portkey()

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# Example with Ollama (requires Ollama running locally)
chat <- chat_openai_compatible(
  base_url = "http://localhost:11434/v1",
  model = "llama2"
)
chat$chat("What is the difference between a tibble and a data frame?")
} # }