openai-api

# OpenAI API - Complete Guide

**Version**: Production Ready ✅
**Package**: openai@6.16.0
**Last Updated**: 2026-01-20

---

## Status

**✅ Production Ready**:
- ✅ Chat Completions API (GPT-5, GPT-4o, GPT-4 Turbo)
- ✅ Embeddings API (text-embedding-3-small, text-embedding-3-large)
- ✅ Images API (DALL-E 3 generation + GPT-Image-1 editing)
- ✅ Audio API (Whisper transcription + TTS with 11 voices)
- ✅ Moderation API (11 safety categories)
- ✅ Streaming patterns (SSE)
- ✅ Function calling / Tools
- ✅ Structured outputs (JSON schemas)
- ✅ Vision (GPT-4o)
- ✅ Both Node.js SDK and fetch approaches

---

## Table of Contents

1. [Quick Start](#quick-start)
2. [Chat Completions API](#chat-completions-api)
3. [GPT-5 Series Models](#gpt-5-series-models)
4. [Streaming Patterns](#streaming-patterns)
5. [Function Calling](#function-calling)
6. [Structured Outputs](#structured-outputs)
7. [Vision (GPT-4o)](#vision-gpt-4o)
8. [Embeddings API](#embeddings-api)
9. [Images API](#images-api)
10. [Audio API](#audio-api)
11. [Moderation API](#moderation-api)
12. [Error Handling](#error-handling)
13. [Rate Limits](#rate-limits)
14. [Common Mistakes & Gotchas](#common-mistakes--gotchas)
15. [TypeScript Gotchas](#typescript-gotchas)
16. [Production Best Practices](#production-best-practices)
17. [Relationship to openai-responses](#relationship-to-openai-responses)

---

## Quick Start

### Installation

```bash
npm install openai@6.16.0
```

### Environment Setup

```bash
export OPENAI_API_KEY="sk-..."
```

Or create `.env` file:
```
OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...
```

### First Chat Completion (Node.js SDK)

```typescript
import OpenAI from 'openai';

const openai = new OpenAI({
  apiKey: process.env.OPENAI_API_KEY,
});

const completion = await openai.chat.completions.create({
  model: 'gpt-5',
  messages: [
    { role: 'user', content: 'What are the three laws of robotics?' }
  ],
});

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

### First Chat Completion (Fetch - Cloudflare Workers