Integration · 60-second setup · Zero markup

Claude Code + OrcaRouter

Claude Code is Anthropic's agentic coding tool that lives in your terminal. It speaks the Anthropic Messages protocol natively — export three environment variables and every session routes through OrcaRouter with automatic failover and zero markup.

Get your API key →Claude Code homepage ↗

Setup

Five steps.

1.Install: npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code
2.Export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://api.orcarouter.ai — WITHOUT /v1. Claude Code appends /v1/messages itself, so adding /v1 produces /v1/v1/messages and fails.
3.Export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=sk-orca-… (your OrcaRouter key).
4.Export ANTHROPIC_MODEL=orcarouter/auto — or any vendor/model ID, e.g. anthropic/claude-opus-4.8.
5.Verify with claude -p "Reply with exactly: OK" — you should see OK. Then run claude for an interactive session and use /model to switch models.

Configuration

npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code

# Anthropic protocol: base URL WITHOUT a version suffix —
# Claude Code appends the versioned /messages path itself.
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL="https://api.orcarouter.ai"
export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN="sk-orca-..."
export ANTHROPIC_MODEL="orcarouter/auto"

# Verify:
claude -p "Reply with exactly: OK"

Why route Claude Code through OrcaRouter?

Claude Code runs long agentic loops — plan, edit, test, repeat — that die hard when Anthropic rate-limits or has an incident. Routing through OrcaRouter keeps the loop alive on a healthy backend, lets you swap in any model (not just Claude) via orcarouter/auto, and puts the whole session's spend in one dashboard.

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