Quickstart with Stainless SDKs
Introduction
Section titled “Introduction”Idiomatic and polished SDKs for your API drive faster integration, broader adoption, quicker upgrades, and trust in your engineering quality.
In this guide, you will generate SDKs from your OpenAPI specification that can be shipped as a beta product to your users. You can iterate from there, polishing and shaping the SDKs.
Before getting started
Section titled “Before getting started”To get the most out of this guide, you’ll need:
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A GitHub account, used for authenticating with Stainless.
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An OpenAPI spec, which is a standard way of describing your API. Stainless reads from this specification to generate SDKs.
If you don’t yet have an OpenAPI spec, you can create one or use an example spec.
1 Create a project
Section titled “ Create a project”Once signed in, you will be directed to create a Stainless organization and your first project. Use your OpenAPI spec, or use an example.
The Stainless config
Section titled “The Stainless config”While your OpenAPI spec includes much of the information needed to generate an SDK, it doesn’t include necessary components like the SDK structure, pagination, publishing settings, and more. Stainless uses both your OpenAPI spec and Stainless config to generate your SDKs. As part of your first generation, we create an initial draft of your Stainless config using an LLM.
2 Try your SDKs
Section titled “ Try your SDKs”Once your build completes successfully, your SDKs are ready to use.
Choose your favorite language. Then click on your staging repository corresponding to the language of your choice. We output code initially to the staging repository under the stainless-sdks GitHub org until you can connect a production repo that you own.
- If you want to get started quickly, use GitHub codespaces with the generated dev containers
- If you want to try it on your machine, follow the instructions in the
CONTRIBUTING.mdof each SDK repository
Share your SDKs
Section titled “Share your SDKs”Take a moment to click on the Members tab in your Stainless organization dashboard to add team members. After accepting an email invite and authenticating with their GitHub handle, members are automatically added to your Stainless project and the staging GitHub repositories we generate.
3 Use the SDK Studio
Section titled “ Use the SDK Studio”After filling out the project creation form, you’ll be taken to the organization dashboard. On this page, you can manage API keys and invite organization members. For now, navigate to your project and click Open SDK Studio at the top-right.
In the SDK Studio, you will see three panes:
- The SDK preview pane shows the shape and structure of your SDKs, along with example usage snippets and type definitions.
- The editor lets you modify both your OpenAPI spec and Stainless config to see changes reflected live in the documentation panel.
- The builds and diagnostics pane shows information about your builds and suggests improvements to your configuration.
Create new builds
Section titled “Create new builds”Building your SDK can be done through the Save & Build SDKs button at the top-right of the SDK Studio. When a build is triggered, you will see a new build in the Builds panel:
A “build” includes:
- A push to your config repository, which tracks all configuration changes
- A push to your staging repository
- A push to your production repository if configured
Troubleshooting
Section titled “Troubleshooting”The Stainless generator always attempts to output something, even if it isn’t perfect.
When the generator detects potential improvements to the OpenAPI spec or the Stainless config, it raises diagnostics in the Diagnostics panel:
- Error: Indicates issues with the usability of the SDK, such as not being able to compile the library or make a request.
- Warning: Indicates major issues with the user experience of the SDK, but doesn’t affect usability of the rest of the SDK, such as an invalid schema or a misconfigured endpoint.
- Note: Indicates potential issues with the user experience of the SDK, but not too consequential for the user.
You can click on a diagnostic for more details about the issue. The diagnostics pane guides you through resolving these issues, but please don’t hesitate to reach out if you need help.