setup

name	setup
description	Guide for installing Tinker, setting up the environment, getting an API key, and verifying everything works. Use when the user is getting started, setting up their environment, or troubleshooting installation issues.

Setup & Installation

Get Tinker and tinker-cookbook running from scratch.

Reference

• docs/install.mdx — Official installation guide
• CONTRIBUTING.md — Development setup
• README.md — Project overview

Step 1: Sign up and get an API key

1. Sign up at https://auth.thinkingmachines.ai/sign-up
2. Create an API key from the console
3. Export it:

export TINKER_API_KEY=<your-key>

Add to your shell profile (.bashrc, .zshrc) for persistence.

Step 2: Install Tinker SDK

pip install tinker

This gives you:

• Python SDK — TrainingClient, SamplingClient, low-level training/sampling APIs
• Tinker CLI — tinker or python -m tinker for management tasks

Step 3: Install tinker-cookbook

git clone https://github.com/thinking-machines-lab/tinker-cookbook.git
cd tinker-cookbook
pip install -e .

Or with dev dependencies (for contributing):

uv sync --extra dev
pre-commit install

Step 4: Verify installation

import tinker
service_client = tinker.ServiceClient()
training_client = service_client.create_lora_training_client(
    base_model="meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B", rank=32,
)
info = training_client.get_info()
print(info)  # Should print model info

Step 5: Run a minimal example

# Supervised learning
python -m tinker_cookbook.recipes.sl_basic

# Reinforcement learning
python -m tinker_cookbook.recipes.rl_basic

Environment variables

Variable	Purpose
TINKER_API_KEY	Required — authenticates with Tinker service
HF_TOKEN	Optional — access gated HuggingFace models (Llama, etc.)
HF_TRUST_REMOTE_CODE	Optional — allow custom tokenizer code
WANDB_API_KEY	Optional — log to Weights & Biases

Common issues

• TINKER_API_KEY not set: Export the key in your shell or .env file
• Tokenizer download fails: Set HF_TOKEN for gated models (e.g., Llama)
• Import errors: Ensure pip install -e . was run from the repo root
• uv not found: Install with curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh