Quickstart

This guide will help you make your first request to the CompactifAI API in minutes.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, you’ll need:

• A CompactifAI API key. Please see our authentication guide for more information.
• We expose a REST API, so you can use any language that can make HTTP requests. We provide examples in cURL, Python, and JavaScript but feel free to use whatever you’re comfortable with.

Step 1: Authentication

All requests to the CompactifAI API require an API key for authentication. If you don’t have an API key yet, see our authentication guide.

Include your API key in the header of all requests:

Authentication Header

Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY

Step 2: Make your first API request

Let’s make a simple request to the Chat Completions API:

cURL

cURL

curl https://api.compactif.ai/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
-d '{
  "model": "cai-llama-3-1-8b-slim",
  "messages": [
    {"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."},
    {"role": "user", "content": "Hello, how are you?"}
  ]
}'

Python

Python

import requests

api_key = "YOUR_API_KEY"
url = "https://api.compactif.ai/v1/chat/completions"

headers = {
  "Content-Type": "application/json",
  "Authorization": f"Bearer {api_key}"
}

data = {
  "model": "cai-llama-3-1-8b-slim",
  "messages": [
      {"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."},
      {"role": "user", "content": "Hello, how are you?"}
  ]
}

response = requests.post(url, headers=headers, json=data)
print(response.json())

JavaScript

JavaScript

async function callCompactifAI() {
const response = await fetch('https://api.compactif.ai/v1/chat/completions', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    'Authorization': 'Bearer YOUR_API_KEY'
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    model: 'cai-llama-3-1-8b-slim',
    messages: [
      {role: 'system', content: 'You are a helpful assistant.'},
      {role: 'user', content: 'Hello, how are you?'}
    ]
  })
});

const data = await response.json();
console.log(data);
}

callCompactifAI();

Step 3: Understanding the response

The API will return a response like this:

API Response

{
"id": "cmpl-uqkvlQyYK7bGYrRHQ0eXlWi7",
"object": "chat.completion",
"created": 1749600000,
"model": "cai-llama-3-1-8b-slim",
"choices": [
  {
    "message": {
      "role": "assistant",
      "content": "Hello! I'm doing well, thank you for asking. I'm an AI assistant created by CompactifAI. How can I help you today?"
    },
    "finish_reason": "stop",
    "index": 0
  }
],
"usage": {
  "prompt_tokens": 23,
  "completion_tokens": 28,
  "total_tokens": 51
}
}

Next Steps

Now that you’ve made your first API call, you can:

• Check out available Models
• Learn more about the Chat Completions endpoint
• Explore the Completions endpoint
• Read our API Reference for detailed information about all endpoints