Cloud Offload

Lemonade can route inference to any OpenAI-compatible cloud provider (Fireworks, OpenAI, OpenRouter, Together, etc.) alongside locally-loaded models. Cloud-routed models show up in /v1/models like any other recipe, so every client connecting to your lemond — the desktop app, the CLI, third-party SDKs, and agents launched via lemonade launch — sees the same catalog without per-client configuration.

Status: experimental. Cloud routing has been validated with Fireworks, OpenAI, OpenRouter, and Together. Other OpenAI-compatible providers should work; report problems with lemond logs and the provider's /v1/models response.

Quickstart

There are two ways to authenticate. Env vars are preferred — they're persistent, never written to disk by lemond, and visible to every connecting client.

Option A: Environment variable (recommended)

Set the provider's API key in lemond's environment before starting the server:

export LEMONADE_FIREWORKS_API_KEY=fw-XXXXX

Then install the provider once:

lemonade cloud install fireworks --base-url https://api.fireworks.ai/inference/v1

That's it. lemond discovers Fireworks's chat-capable models, registers them under the fireworks. namespace, and surfaces them in /v1/models:

lemonade list | grep fireworks

Option B: Runtime API key

If you don't want to set an env var (e.g., on a dev box where the key shouldn't persist), register the provider and supply the key at runtime:

lemonade cloud install fireworks --base-url https://api.fireworks.ai/inference/v1
lemonade cloud auth fireworks
# Prompts: API key for fireworks:

Or in one step:

lemonade cloud install fireworks \
  --base-url https://api.fireworks.ai/inference/v1 \
  --api-key fw-XXXXX

Runtime keys live in lemond's process memory only — they're never written to disk and they vanish on restart. To make them survive a restart, switch to Option A.

Using cloud models

Cloud-discovered models use a dot-namespaced name: <provider>.<upstream-id>. For example, after installing Fireworks you'll see entries like:

fireworks.accounts/fireworks/models/kimi-k2p5
fireworks.qwen3-235b-a22b

They work everywhere a local model name works:

lemonade load fireworks.kimi-k2p5
lemonade run fireworks.kimi-k2p5

Standard OpenAI chat completions:

curl -X POST http://localhost:13305/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "fireworks.kimi-k2p5",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "hi"}]
  }'

No special headers, no per-request credentials — lemond resolves the key from its registry and forwards the request transparently.

Authentication precedence

When lemond needs an API key for a provider, it resolves it in this order:

1. LEMONADE_<PROVIDER>_API_KEY env var, if set in lemond's environment.
2. Runtime key from POST /v1/cloud/auth, if previously supplied this session.
3. None — lemond refuses to call the provider and returns a structured error.

Env vars always win. If you POST /v1/cloud/auth while the env var is set, the server returns 409 Conflict with {"error":{"type":"auth_conflict","env_var":"LEMONADE_<PROVIDER>_API_KEY"}} and does not store the supplied key. This means an operator who provisions a "house" key via env can trust that a client can't silently override it.

How discovery works

lemond calls GET <base_url>/models for each installed provider with a resolvable key, then filters the results to chat-capable models (using supports_chat, capabilities, architecture.modality, type, or id-pattern fallback depending on the provider). For each model it captures:

• Public name — <provider>.<cleaned_upstream_id> after stripping accounts/<x>/models/ wrappers and deduplicating leading provider segments.
• Capability labels — vision, tool-calling, reasoning, normalized from each provider's divergent metadata into Lemonade's shared vocabulary.
• Context window — from context_length, when reported.
• Per-million-token cost — USD per 1M input/output tokens, from OpenRouter (per-token × 1e6) or Together (per-1M), when reported. Used for display only — never affects routing.

Discovery runs at every cache build (server startup, install, auth) and is best-effort: an unreachable provider logs a warning and is skipped without blocking the rest of the catalog.

Admin / multi-client deployments

A single lemond can serve multiple connecting clients (GUI, CLI, SDKs, coding agents on the same or different machines). Cloud config is shared infrastructure config, not per-client state:

• Provider URLs persist in lemond's config.json under cloud_providers. Every connecting client sees the same list.
• API keys live in env vars (persistent, shared) or lemond process memory (ephemeral). They are never written to disk by lemond, and GET /v1/system-info reports auth status but never the key value.

A common admin pattern: set LEMONADE_FIREWORKS_API_KEY in the systemd / Docker / service environment, install the provider once, and every user pointing their client at the server gets cloud access without seeing the key.

Troubleshooting

For a structured view of every installed provider's auth state and discovered model count, hit GET /v1/system-info — the cloud.providers[] block reports env_var_set, runtime_key_set, and models_discovered per provider.

See also:

• CLI reference: cloud subcommands
• API reference: /v1/cloud/auth, /v1/install, /v1/uninstall