Beta: Firebase Genkit is in Beta, which means that it is not subject to any SLA or deprecation policy and could change in backwards-incompatible ways. Throughout the Beta period, Firebase Genkit and its documentation will be updated and improved.

Get started

This guide shows you how to get started with Genkit in a Node.js app.

Prerequisites

This guide assumes that you're familiar with building applications with Node.js.

To complete this quickstart, make sure that your development environment meets the following requirements:

Node.js v20+
npm

Install Genkit dependencies

Install the following Genkit dependencies to use Genkit in your project:

genkit provides Genkit core capabilities.
@genkit-ai/googleai provides access to the Google AI Gemini models.

npm install genkit @genkit-ai/googleai

Configure your model API key

For this guide, we’ll show you how to use the Gemini API which provides a generous free tier and does not require a credit card to get started. To use the Gemini API, you'll need an API key. If you don't already have one, create a key in Google AI Studio.

Get an API key from Google AI Studio

After you’ve created an API key, set the GOOGLE_GENAI_API_KEY environment variable to your key with the following command:

export GOOGLE_GENAI_API_KEY=<your API key>

Make your first request

Get started with Genkit in just a few lines of simple code.

// import the Genkit and Google AI plugin libraries
import { gemini15Flash, googleAI } from '@genkit-ai/googleai';
import { genkit } from 'genkit';

// configure a Genkit instance
const ai = genkit({
  plugins: [googleAI()],
  model: gemini15Flash, // set default model
});

(async () => {
  // make a generation request
  const { text } = await ai.generate('Hello, Gemini!');
  console.log(text);
})();

Next steps

Now that you’re set up to make model requests with Genkit, learn how to use more Genkit capabilities to build your AI-powered apps and workflows. To get started with additional Genkit capabilities, see the following guides:

Developer tools: Learn how to set up and use Genkit’s CLI and developer UI to help you locally test and debug your app.
Generating content: Learn how to use Genkit’s unified generation API to generate text and structured data from any supported model.
Creating flows: Learn how to use special Genkit functions, called flows, that provide end-to-end observability for workflows and rich debugging from Genkit tooling.
Prompting models: Learn how Genkit lets you treat prompt templates as functions, encapsulating model configurations and input/output schema.