hf_text-generation-inference/docs/source/basic_tutorials/consuming_tgi.md

# Consuming Text Generation Inference

There are many ways you can consume Text Generation Inference server in your applications. After launching, you can use the `/generate` route and make a `POST` request to get results from the server. You can also use the `/generate_stream` route if you want TGI to return a stram of tokens. You can make the requests using the tool of your preference, such as curl, Python or TypeScrpt. For a final end-to-end experience, we also open-sourced ChatUI, a chat interface for open-source models.

## curl

After the launch, you can query the model using either the `/generate` or `/generate_stream` routes:

```bash
curl 127.0.0.1:8080/generate \
    -X POST \
    -d '{"inputs":"What is Deep Learning?","parameters":{"max_new_tokens":20}}' \
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json'
```


## Inference Client

[`huggingface-hub`](https://huggingface.co/docs/huggingface_hub/main/en/index) is a Python library to interact with the Hugging Face Hub, including its endpoints. It provides a nice high-level class, [`~huggingface_hub.InferenceClient`], which makes it easy to make calls to a TGI endpoint. `InferenceClient` also takes care of parameter validation and provides a simple to-use interface.

You can simply install `huggingface-hub` package with pip.

```bash
pip install huggingface-hub
```

Once you start the TGI server, instantiate `InferenceClient()` with the URL to the endpoint serving the model. You can then call `text_generation()` to hit the endpoint through Python. 

```python
from huggingface_hub import InferenceClient

client = InferenceClient(model=URL_TO_ENDPOINT_SERVING_TGI)
client.text_generation(prompt="Write a code for snake game", model=URL_TO_ENDPOINT_SERVING_TGI)
```

You can check out the details of the function [here](https://huggingface.co/docs/huggingface_hub/main/en/package_reference/inference_client#huggingface_hub.InferenceClient.text_generation).


## ChatUI

ChatUI is an open-source interface built for LLM serving. It offers many customization options, such as web search with SERP API and more. ChatUI can automatically consume the TGI server and even provides an option to switch between different TGI endpoints. You can try it out at [Hugging Chat](https://huggingface.co/chat/), or use the [ChatUI Docker Space](https://huggingface.co/new-space?template=huggingchat/chat-ui-template) to deploy your own Hugging Chat to Spaces.

To serve both ChatUI and TGI in same environment, simply add your own endpoints to the `MODELS` variable in `.env.local` file inside the `chat-ui` repository. Provide the endpoints pointing to where TGI is served.

```
{
// rest of the model config here
"endpoints": [{"url": "https://HOST:PORT/generate_stream"}]
}
```

![ChatUI](https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/chatui_screen.png)

## API documentation

You can consult the OpenAPI documentation of the `text-generation-inference` REST API using the `/docs` route. The Swagger UI is also available [here](https://huggingface.github.io/text-generation-inference).