Your First API Call

The DeepSeek API uses an API format compatible with OpenAI. By modifying the configuration, you can use the OpenAI SDK or softwares compatible with the OpenAI API to access the DeepSeek API.

PARAM	VALUE
base_url *	https://api.deepseek.com
api_key	apply for an API key

* To be compatible with OpenAI, you can also use https://api.deepseek.com/v1 as the base_url. But note that the v1 here has NO relationship with the model's version.

* deepseek-chat and deepseek-reasoner are upgraded to DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp now. deepseek-chat is the non-thinking mode of DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp and deepseek-reasoner is the thinking mode of DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp.

Invoke The Chat API

Once you have obtained an API key, you can access the DeepSeek API using the following example scripts. This is a non-stream example, you can set the stream parameter to true to get stream response.

curl

curl https://api.deepseek.com/chat/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${DEEPSEEK_API_KEY}" \
  -d '{
        "model": "deepseek-chat",
        "messages": [
          {"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."},
          {"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}
        ],
        "stream": false
      }'

python

# Please install OpenAI SDK first: `pip3 install openai`
import os
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(api_key=os.environ.get('DEEPSEEK_API_KEY'), base_url="https://api.deepseek.com")

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="deepseek-chat",
    messages=[
        {"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant"},
        {"role": "user", "content": "Hello"},
    ],
    stream=False
)

print(response.choices[0].message.content)

nodejs

// Please install OpenAI SDK first: `npm install openai`

import OpenAI from "openai";

const openai = new OpenAI({
        baseURL: 'https://api.deepseek.com',
        apiKey: process.env.DEEPSEEK_API_KEY,
});

async function main() {
  const completion = await openai.chat.completions.create({
    messages: [{ role: "system", content: "You are a helpful assistant." }],
    model: "deepseek-chat",
  });

  console.log(completion.choices[0].message.content);
}

main();