The anti-dashboard: route LLMs through a YAML file

What it does

uni-api is an API gateway that normalizes calls from OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Vertex, Azure, AWS, Groq, and others into the OpenAI request/response format. You define providers and API keys in a single api.yaml, and the proxy handles routing, retries, and load balancing without shipping a frontend. It exposes the standard OpenAI endpoints—chat completions, embeddings, image generation, audio, and moderation—so downstream tools don’t need to know which backend is actually answering.

The interesting bit

The project treats “no frontend” as a feature, not a missing feature. Instead of click-ops, you configure weighted load balancing, channel cooling after failures, per-model timeouts, and rate limits directly in YAML. It even exploits Vertex AI’s regional endpoints to multiply your Gemini and Claude concurrency without extra configuration.

Key highlights

• Supports native tool use and image recognition across OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Vertex, Azure, AWS, and xAI, then presents them through standard OpenAI endpoints.
• Four load-balancing strategies: channel-level weighted, sequential round-robin, API key polling, and automatic Vertex regional distribution.
• Model renaming and request-body parameter overrides let you expose simplified model names or inject provider-specific flags without touching client code.
• Built-in moderation review can reject inappropriate messages before they reach the backend, reducing the odds of your provider API key getting banned.
• Rate limiting supports per-minute, hour, day, month, and year quotas.

Caveats

• Built explicitly for personal use; commercial features like multi-tenant billing are out of scope by design.
• No frontend means every change requires editing api.yaml—there is no admin panel for on-the-fly tweaks.

Verdict

If you run personal LLM experiments and want one OpenAI-shaped endpoint that load-balances across your scattered API keys, uni-api is a leaner alternative to full-featured dashboards. If you need user management, billing, or a GUI, keep looking—this project deliberately isn’t that.