Reference Server

RAIS Reference Server

rais-server is a standalone RAIS Protocol v1 server. Run it with any API key and you have a compliant streaming endpoint in seconds — no code required.

rais-server is also the canonical reference implementation of the RAIS Protocol server side. If you are building a RAIS server in another language, reading the source code at packages/rais-server/ (opens in a new tab) shows exactly what a compliant implementation looks like.

Quick start

export OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...
npx rais-server

Output:

  RAIS Server

  Provider    openai
  Model       gpt-4o-mini
  Endpoint    http://localhost:3001/api/chat

  Test with:
    npx rais-compliance http://localhost:3001/api/chat
    curl -N -X POST http://localhost:3001/api/chat \
         -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
         -d '{"messages":[{"role":"user","content":"hello"}]}'

Provider auto-detection

rais-server reads your environment variables and picks a provider automatically:

Env variableProviderDefault model
ANTHROPIC_API_KEYanthropicclaude-haiku-4-5-20251001
OPENAI_API_KEYopenaigpt-4o-mini
GROQ_API_KEYgroqllama-3.3-70b-versatile

If multiple keys are set, Anthropic takes priority.

Options

npx rais-server [options]
 
  --provider <name>    openai | anthropic | groq
  --model <name>       Override the default model
  --port <n>           Port (default: 3001)
  --system <text>      System prompt
  --max-tokens <n>     Max tokens (default: 1024)
  --no-cors            Disable CORS headers

Examples

export OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...
npx rais-server --provider openai --model gpt-4o

Use as a development backend

Point any RAIS client at http://localhost:3001/api/chat:

const chat = useAIChat({ endpoint: 'http://localhost:3001/api/chat' })

This is useful when you are building a custom frontend and want a real streaming backend before writing any server code.

Verify compliance

npx rais-compliance http://localhost:3001/api/chat

The reference server is designed to pass RAIS v1 Recommended (all MUST + SHOULD tests).

API

The server exposes a single endpoint:

POST /api/chat
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "messages": [
    {"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}
  ]
}

Response: text/event-stream RAIS v1 SSE stream.

All other routes return 404. OPTIONS requests return 204 with CORS headers.

ComplianceStats