OpenRouter SDK Patterns

Overview

Build production-grade OpenRouter client wrappers using the OpenAI SDK. The OpenAI Python/TypeScript SDKs work natively with OpenRouter by changing base_url to https://openrouter.ai/api/v1. This skill covers typed wrappers, retry strategies, middleware, and reusable patterns.

Prerequisites

• An OpenRouter API key (sk-or-v1-...) exported as OPENROUTER_API_KEY — see the openrouter-install-auth skill for setup
• Python 3.8+ with the OpenAI SDK plus requests (used for the /auth/key credits check and /generation cost lookups), or Node.js 18+ with the OpenAI SDK
• Optional: tenacity if you want the custom retry decorator beyond the SDK's built-in backoff
• An app name and URL to send as HTTP-Referer / X-Title default headers for dashboard attribution

Instructions