openai-cli

A universal cli for OpenAI, written in BASH.

Features

• Scalable architecture allows for continuous support of new APIs.

• Custom API name, version, and related parameters.

• Dry-run mode (without actually initiating API calls) to facilitate debugging of APIs and save costs.

• Features related to chat/completions:

  - [x] Complete pipelining to interoperate with other applications
  - [x] Allow prompts to be read from command line arguments, files, and standard input
  - [x] Support streaming
  - [x] Support multiple topics
  - [x] Support continuous conversations.
  - [ ] Token usage
  

Installation

• jq is required.
  • Linux: sudo apt install jq
  • macOS: brew install jq
• Download script and mark it executable:

  curl -fsSLOJ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/janlay/openai-cli/master/openai
  chmod +x openai

  You may want to add this file to a directory in $PATH.

Now you can try it out!

Tips

Getting started

First of all, run openai -h to grab help.

⚠️ If you run openai directly, it appears to be stuck. This is because openai expects to receive prompt content from stdin, but the stdin has no content available yet. Just press Ctrl+C to interrupt and exit.

OpenAI key

$OPENAI_API_KEY must be available to use this tool. Prepare your OpenAI key in ~/.profile file by adding this line:

export OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-****

Or you may want to run with a temporary key for one-time use:

OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-**** openai hello

Testing your API invokation

openai offers a dry-run mode that allows you to test command composition without incurring any costs. Give it a try!

openai -n hello, world!

# This would be same:
openai -n 'hello, world!'

With full pipelining support, you can achieve the same functionality using alternative methods:

echo 'hello, world!' | openai -n

For BASH gurus

This would be same:

echo 'hello, world!' >hello.txt
openai -n <hello.txt

Even this one:

openai -n <<<'hello, world!'

and this:

openai -n <<(echo 'hello, world!')

It seems you have understood the basic usage. Try to get real answer from OpenAI:

openai hello, world!

Topics

Topic starts with a @ sign. so openai @translate Hello, world! means calling the specified topic translate.

To create new topic, like translate, with the initial prompt (system role, internally):

openai @translate 'Translate, no other words: Chinese -> English, Non-Chinese -> Chinese'

Then you can use the topic by

openai @translate 'Hello, world!'

You should get answer like 你好，世界！.

Again, to see what happens, use the dry-run mode by adding -n. You will see the payload would be sent:

{
  "model": "gpt-3.5-turbo",
  "temperature": 0.5,
  "max_tokens": 200,
  "stream": true,
  "messages": [
    {
      "role": "system",
      "content": "Translate, no other words: Chinese -> English, Non-Chinese -> Chinese"
    },
    {
      "role": "user",
      "content": "Hello, world!"
    }
  ]
}

Chatting

All use cases above are standalone queries, not converstaions. To chat with OpenAI, use -c. This can also continue existing topic conversation by prepending @topic.

Please note that chat requests will quickly consume tokens, leading to increased costs.

Advanced

To be continued.

Manual

To be continued.