responses.js

A lightweight Express.js server that implements OpenAI's Responses API, built on top of Chat Completions and powered by Hugging Face Inference Providers.

✨ Features

• ResponsesAPI: Partial implementation of OpenAI's Responses API, on top of Chat Completion API
• Inference Providers: Powered by Hugging Face Inference Providers
• Streaming Support: Support for streamed responses
• Structured Output: Support for structured data responses (e.g. jsonschema)
• Function Calling: Tool and function calling capabilities
• Multi-modal Input: Text and image input support
• Demo UI: Interactive web interface for testing

Not implemented: remote function calling, MCP server, file upload, stateful API, etc.

🚀 Quick Start

Prerequisites

• Node.js (v18 or higher)
• pnpm (recommended) or npm
• an Hugging Face token with inference permissions. Create one from your user settings.

Installation & Setup

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/huggingface/responses.js.git
cd responses.js

# Install dependencies
pnpm install

# Start the development server
pnpm dev

The server will be available at http://localhost:3000.

Running Examples

Explore the various capabilities with our example scripts located in the ./examples folder:

# Basic text input
pnpm run example text

# Multi-turn conversations
pnpm run example multi_turn

# Text + image input
pnpm run example image

# Streaming responses
pnpm run example streaming

# Structured output
pnpm run example structured_output
pnpm run example structured_output_streaming

# Function calling
pnpm run example function
pnpm run example function_streaming

🧪 Testing

Important Notes

• Server must be running (pnpm dev) on http://localhost:3000
• HF_TOKEN environment variable set with your Hugging Face token
• Tests use real inference providers and will incur costs
• Tests are not run in CI due to billing requirements

Running Tests

# Run all tests
pnpm test

# Run specific test patterns
pnpm test --grep "streaming"
pnpm test --grep "function"
pnpm test --grep "structured"

Interactive Demo UI

Experience the API through our interactive web interface, adapted from the openai-responses-starter-app.

Setup

1. Create a configuration file:

# Create demo/.env
cat > demo/.env << EOF
MODEL="cohere@CohereLabs/c4ai-command-a-03-2025"
OPENAI_BASE_URL=http://localhost:3000/v1
OPENAI_API_KEY=${HF_TOKEN:-<your-huggingface-token>}
EOF

2. Install demo dependencies:

pnpm demo:install

3. Launch the demo:

pnpm demo:dev

The demo will be available at http://localhost:3001.

🐳 Running with Docker

You can run the server in a production-ready container using Docker.

Build the Docker image

docker build -t responses.js .

Run the server

docker run -p 3000:3000 responses.js

The server will be available at http://localhost:3000.

📁 Project Structure

responses.js/
├── demo/             # Interactive chat UI demo
├── examples/         # Example scripts using openai-node client
├── src/
│   ├── index.ts      # Application entry point
│   ├── server.ts     # Express app configuration and route definitions
│   ├── routes/       # API route implementations
│   ├── middleware/   # Middleware (validation, logging, etc.)
│   └── schemas/      # Zod validation schemas
├── scripts/          # Utility and build scripts
├── package.json      # Package configuration and dependencies
└── README.md         # This file

🛣️ Done / TODOs

Note: This project is in active development. The roadmap below represents our current priorities and may evolve. Do not take anything for granted.

• OpenAI types integration for consistent output
• Streaming mode support
• Structured output capabilities
• Function calling implementation
• Repository migration to dedicated responses.js repo
• Basic development tooling setup
• Demo application with comprehensive instructions
• Multi-turn conversation fixes for text messages + tool calls
• Correctly return "usage" field
• MCP support (non-streaming)
• MCP support (streaming)
• Tools execution (web search, file search, image generation, code interpreter)
• Background mode support
• Additional API routes (GET, DELETE, CANCEL, LIST responses)
• Reasoning capabilities

🤝 Contributing

We welcome contributions! Please feel free to submit issues, feature requests, or pull requests.

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

🙏 Acknowledgments

• Based on OpenAI's Responses API specification
• Built on top of OpenAI's nodejs client
• Demo UI adapted from openai-responses-starter-app
• Built on top of Hugging Face Inference Providers