m serve

Run a Mellea program as an OpenAI-compatible chat endpoint with m serve.

m serve runs any Mellea program as an OpenAI-compatible chat endpoint. This lets any LLM client — LangChain, the OpenAI SDK, curl — call your Mellea program as if it were a model.

Prerequisites: pip install "mellea[server]".

The serve() function

Your program must define a serve() function with this signature:

from cli.serve.models import ChatMessage
from mellea.core import ModelOutputThunk, SamplingResult

def serve(
    input: list[ChatMessage],
    requirements: list[str] | None = None,
    model_options: dict | None = None,
) -> ModelOutputThunk | SamplingResult:
    """Your Mellea program logic here."""
    ...

m serve loads your file, finds serve(), and routes incoming requests to it. ChatMessage has role and content fields matching the OpenAI chat format.

Example serve program

import mellea
from cli.serve.models import ChatMessage
from mellea.core import ModelOutputThunk, Requirement, SamplingResult
from mellea.stdlib.context import ChatContext
from mellea.stdlib.requirements import simple_validate
from mellea.stdlib.sampling import RejectionSamplingStrategy

session = mellea.start_session(ctx=ChatContext())

def serve(
    input: list[ChatMessage],
    requirements: list[str] | None = None,
    model_options: dict | None = None,
) -> ModelOutputThunk | SamplingResult:
    """Takes a prompt as input and runs it through a Mellea program."""
    message = input[-1].content
    reqs = [
        Requirement(
            "Keep this under 50 words",
            validation_fn=simple_validate(lambda x: len(x.split()) < 50),
        ),
        *(requirements or []),
    ]
    return session.instruct(
        description=message,
        requirements=reqs,
        strategy=RejectionSamplingStrategy(loop_budget=3),
        model_options=model_options,
    )

The session is initialised at module level so it is reused across requests. This preserves the ChatContext conversation history across turns.

Starting m serve

m serve path/to/your_program.py

The server starts on port 8000 by default and exposes:

• POST /v1/chat/completions — OpenAI-compatible chat completions endpoint
• GET /health — health check

To see all options:

m serve --help

Calling the served endpoint

Any OpenAI-compatible client works. Using curl:

curl http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Summarize this in one sentence."}]}'

Using the OpenAI Python SDK:

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(base_url="http://localhost:8000/v1", api_key="unused")
response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="mellea",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Summarize this in one sentence."}],
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)

Full example: docs/examples/m_serve/m_serve_example_simple.py

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See also: Context and Sessions | Backends and Configuration | CLI Reference