Providers¶

Bakwas talks to LLMs through a pluggable provider registry in config/providers.yaml. It ships with sensible defaults for Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, Google Gemini, DeepSeek, and Groq. Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint is supported.

How providers are enabled¶

A provider is hidden from the UI automatically when its API key is missing (or, for local providers like Ollama, when its api_base is missing). You can leave unused entries in the file without them cluttering the dropdown.

To enable a provider, set its corresponding environment variable in .env. See Environment variables for the full list of keys.

Customizing without touching the shipped file¶

To add or modify providers without editing the tracked config/providers.yaml, create config/providers.local.yaml. Bakwas loads the local override first when present, and the file is git-ignored.

This is the recommended approach for:

Adding a custom OpenAI-compatible proxy.
Pinning specific models.
Disabling providers you don't use.

Provider schema¶

Each provider entry supports these fields:

Field	Required	Description
`id`	Yes	Unique identifier (also used in logs).
`label`	No	Display name shown in the model dropdown.
`type`	Yes	LiteLLM provider prefix. Use `openai` for any OpenAI-compatible endpoint that isn't a named provider.
`api_key_env`	Sometimes	Env var holding the API key. Leave unset for keyless (local) providers.
`api_base`	No	Override the default API base URL. Required for custom endpoints.
`default`	No	If `true`, this provider's default model becomes the app default.
`models`	No	Explicit list: `[id, ...]` or `[{id, name, default}, ...]`.
`models_endpoint`	No	`auto` (default) enables runtime discovery where supported.

Example: custom OpenAI-compatible proxy¶

# config/providers.local.yaml
providers:
  - id: my-proxy
    label: My Proxy
    type: openai
    api_key_env: MY_PROXY_API_KEY
    api_base: https://my-proxy.example.com/v1
    models:
      - id: gpt-4o-mini
        name: GPT-4o mini (via proxy)

Then add MY_PROXY_API_KEY=... to .env and the matching line to docker-compose.yml:

environment:
  - MY_PROXY_API_KEY=${MY_PROXY_API_KEY:-}

Example: local Ollama¶

providers:
  - id: ollama-local
    label: Ollama (local)
    type: ollama
    api_base: http://localhost:11434
    models_endpoint: auto

No API key needed. Make sure Ollama is running on the host and reachable from wherever Bakwas runs (e.g., use host.docker.internal:11434 inside a Docker container).