Developer Guide
Authentication, models, errors, rate limits, and streaming for CanalAPI.
The Developer Guide explains the public CanalAPI HTTP API and its conventions. It is intended for engineers integrating CanalAPI into an application.
CanalAPI is compatible with three protocols under the same Base URL:
- OpenAI Chat Completions / Responses (recommended; works for every model)
- Anthropic Messages (native Claude format)
- Google Gemini native (
v1beta/v1)
Override the baseURL and key on any of those SDKs and it should work as a drop-in.
In this guide
- Authentication — Bearer token,
x-goog-api-key,?key=variants - Quickstart — paste-and-run in five minutes
- Endpoints — every HTTP endpoint (chat, embeddings, images, audio, moderations, Anthropic, Gemini)
- Models — supported families and how to choose
- Streaming — SSE protocol with examples
- Errors — status codes, error-code segments, retry strategy
- Rate Limits — limit dimensions, response headers, handling
For paste-ready snippets, also see Examples.