AI CLI Tools

API Commands

Interact with OpenAI APIs directly from the terminal using curl or dedicated CLI tools. Make completions, embeddings, and image generation requests programmatically.

7 commands

Pro Tips

Store your API key in OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable for secure, reusable authentication.

Use 'jq' to parse JSON responses: curl ... | jq '.choices[0].message.content'

Set max_tokens to control response length and manage costs on expensive models.

Common Mistakes

Never commit API keys to version control. Use environment variables or secret managers.

API costs vary significantly by model. GPT-4 is ~30x more expensive than GPT-3.5-turbo.

Commands

Chat completion

$ curl https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"model":"gpt-4","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello!"}]}'

Make a chat completion API request.

List models

$ curl https://api.openai.com/v1/models -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY"

List available OpenAI models.

Create embeddings

$ curl https://api.openai.com/v1/embeddings -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"model":"text-embedding-3-small","input":"Hello world"}'

Generate text embeddings via API.

Generate image (DALL-E)

$ curl https://api.openai.com/v1/images/generations -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"model":"dall-e-3","prompt":"A cute cat","n":1,"size":"1024x1024"}'

Generate an image using DALL-E.

Stream completion

$ curl https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"model":"gpt-4","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Tell me a story"}],"stream":true}'

Stream chat completion response.

Check API key

$ curl https://api.openai.com/v1/models -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" | jq '.data[0].id'

Verify API key is valid by listing a model.

Set API key (bash)

$ export OPENAI_API_KEY='sk-...'

Set OpenAI API key as environment variable.