Are you curious about integrating AI capabilities into your Ruby applications? Look no further! This tutorial shows you how to get started using Claude AI with ruby. Perfect for ruby devs looking to enhance their applications with AI capabilities.
- Introduction to Claude AI assistant and the Anthropic API
- Getting an Anthropic API key
- Setting up Ruby and necessary gems
- Introducing to claude-ruby gem
- Basic examples using claude-ruby
Claude is a next-generation AI assistant developed by Anthropic. It's designed to be safe, accurate, and secure, making it an excellent choice for various tasks. While often compared to ChatGPT, Claude offers competitive performance and pricing, with the recently released Claude 3.5 Sonnet version showing impressive benchmark results.
To get started with Claude and Ruby, you'll need to follow these steps:
Obtain an Anthropic API Key
Visit the Anthropic Console (console.anthropic.com)
Sign up for an account if you haven't already
Generate a new API key
Save this key securely - you'll need it later!
Create a New Rails Application
rails new your_app_name
Add the claude-ruby gem to your Gemfile
# Gemfile
gem 'claude-ruby'
Run bundle install to install dependencies
cd your_app_name
bundle install
Set Up Environment Variables
You could use rails credentials for this, but I prefer to use dotenv gem
# Gemfile
gem 'claude-ruby'
gem 'dotenv'
Create a .env file and add your Anthropic API key
# .env
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="YOUR_API_KEY"
Create an AI Agent Service
Set up a service class to handle API calls using the claude-ruby gem
mkdir app/services
touch app/services/ai_agent.rb
# app/services/ai_agent.rb
require 'claude/client'
class AiAgent
def anthropic_api_key
@anthropic_api_key ||= ENV['ANTHROPIC_API_KEY']
end
def claude
@claude ||= Claude::Client.new(anthropic_api_key)
end
def format_claude_response(response)
claude.parse_response(response) rescue "ERROR: Couldn't extract text from Claude response"
end
end
Testing Your Setup
Once your environment is configured, you can test the integration using the Rails console:
Instantiate a new Claude client
claude = AiAgent.new.claude
Define a message to send to Claude
message = "Tell me a joke."
Use the messages method to make an API call
response = claude.messages(claude.user_message(message))
Parse the response to get the formatted text
y AiAgent.new.format_claude_response(response)
Claude offers additional features to customize your AI interactions:
- System Messages: Provide instructions on how Claude should process requests
- Model Selection: Choose between different Claude models
- Response Parameters: Adjust settings like max tokens and temperature
These will be discussed in detail in the next article.
By following this guide, you'll be well on your way to leveraging the power of Claude AI in your Ruby applications. Stay tuned for more advanced topics and examples in future posts!
Examples from the video and article are available on github:
https://github.com/devgabcom/claude101