API Clients

gRPC Clients

For new projects, we recommend using one of the auto-generated clients built using gRPC. These clients may offer better performance since they use a gRPC channel where the network transfer of the data is optimized. The data is serialized with Protocol Buffers.

Since the gRPC clients are auto-generated, they will always have the latest available Clarifai API feature-set.

It's possible to make these clients using the standard HTTP+JSON channel, while enjoying a better auto-completion support in most IDEs (compared to building and parsing JSON directly), and easily being able to switch to using a gRPC channel when/if desired.

The gRPC clients below are currently available and we'll be adding more as time goes on.

Manually-built Clients (deprecated)

Client Installation Instructions

The key to be used as authorization can be either:

  • an API key, which is tied to a certain application, or

  • a Personal Access Token (PAT), which is tied to a user.

Since a user can own multiple applications, using a PAT is more powerful. However, using a PAT also means that you need to specify the application ID to which the request should be applied.

With most endpoints you can freely choose whether to use an API key or a PAT. In this documentation, some code examples use one and some the other. But certain endpoints support only PAT (e.g. creating a new application or a new API key).

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Installation (build.gradle)
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

repositories {
    jcenter()
}

dependencies {
    implementation 'com.clarifai:clarifai-grpc:LATEST_VERSION'
}

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Initialize client
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

import com.clarifai.channel.ClarifaiChannel;
import com.clarifai.credentials.ClarifaiCallCredentials;
import com.clarifai.grpc.api.*;
import io.grpc.Channel;


// Construct one of the channels you want to use
Channel channel = ClarifaiChannel.INSTANCE.getJsonChannel();
Channel channel = ClarifaiChannel.INSTANCE.getInsecureGrpcChannel();

// Note: You can also use a secure (encrypted) ClarifaiChannel.INSTANCE.getGrpcChannel() however
// it is currently not supported in the latest gRPC version.

V2Grpc.V2BlockingStub stub = V2Grpc.newBlockingStub(channel)
    .withCallCredentials(new ClarifaiCallCredentials("{YOUR_CLARIFAI_API_KEY}"));

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