Dynagate is a lightweight, high-performance LLM gateway written in Go that acts as a proxy for OpenAI-compatible APIs. It provides seamless model routing, automatic key and model failover, live configuration hot-reloading without restarts, token authentication, and custom header injection with zero third-party dependencies.
## Features
1.**OpenAI-compatible endpoints**:
-`/v1/models` (GET): Dynamically lists unique active model IDs.
-`/v1/chat/completions` (POST): Proxies non-streaming and streaming (`text/event-stream`) completions.
- Watches `models.csv` (overridable via command-line flags) continuously using a background thread and automatically reloads configuration updates without dropping active connections.
3.**Fallback and retry orchestration**:
- Attempts keys configured for the requested model sequentially.
- Cascades automatically to the next model in the priority chain (wrapping around to cover all entries) if all keys for the requested model fail.
- Updates the `"model"` field dynamically in the outgoing request body before proxying, ensuring upstream compatibility.
4.**Flexible authorization**:
- Optional gateway token authentication via command-line key file.
- Key options (`""`, `"-"`) to strip authorization headers when proxying to local or open upstreams.
- Special `"-blank-"` key config to pass an empty `Authorization: Bearer` header.
5.**External config updater**:
- Executes a periodic CLI command (`-csv-updater`) at a custom interval (`-csv-update-interval`) to fetch, generate, or download fresh model listings.
6.**Custom header injection (`extra` field)**:
- Sets or overrides custom headers dynamically per model deployment using a JSON configuration string.
## Tech stack
- **Language**: Go 1.26+
- **Dependencies**: None (pure Go standard library)
- **Deployment Platform**: Linux/Docker/bare VPS (runs as a standalone static binary)
"messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Count from 1 to 5"}]
}'
```
## Troubleshooting
### Dynamic loading failures
- **Symptom**: Config manager reports file not found warnings at startup.
- **Solution**: The gateway is built to run even if `models.csv` is initially missing. Create or write to the CSV configuration file and the hot-reloader will parse and activate it within 1 second.
- **Solution**: Check that you are passing one of the correct Bearer tokens configured in the `-key` token file. Trim any whitespace, and verify it starts with `Bearer `.
First, security reasons. After the supply chain attacks on LiteLLM and other large gateway projects, the author stopped trusting them and wanted to build something that doesn't have any third-party dependencies. As such, Dynagate can be considered a drop-in replacement for LiteLLM proxy mode if you only need OpenAI-compatible completions and model listing endpoints.
Second, flexibility. A lot of existing LLM interaction tools, including gateways, don't support keyless or empty-key access that local inference engines or some public LLM providers offer, and also make it complicated and/or impossible to inject custom HTTP headers into outgoing requests.
Third, simplicity. Dynagate was designed with instant failover (without any extra setup) and instant configuration reload in mind, but without any extra overhead. This makes it much faster than even e.g. Bifrost, which is also written in Go and considered pretty fast on its own.
Fourth, pluggable external commands to **dynamically** update the entire model configuration, running in a specified interval. This is something yet unheard in any existing LLM gateway.
Yes, but that's not tested yet. It is 100% compatible at least with [PicoClaw](https://github.com/sipeed/picoclaw), and was particularly tuned to address PicoClaw's incompatibility with keyless LLM setups, and these two services work together very nicely. The author personally uses Dynagate + PicoClaw setup on a quite weak fileserver machine in combination with free-tier (keyless access) OpenCode Zen and some other models (see the included [models.csv](models.csv) as an example).
To configure models accessible through Dynagate in PicoClaw, select "LiteLLM" as a provider, then use `[your_dynagate_url]/v1` as an endpoint. Specify any string as an API key if you didn't enable authentication in Dynagate.
### Why was CSV format chosen for model configuration (as opposed to JSON, YAML, TOML etc)?
The entire initial idea behind Dynagate was for it to be able to accept dynamically generated configs on the fly. The means of generating these configs may be as straighforward as using POSIX AWK, command-line tools like Miller and/or plain shell scripts. The only format simpler than CSV to fulfill this task would be TSV (tab-separated values), but it is prone to errors when manually copying the contents between environments may inadvertently convert tab characters to spaces. As a universal tabular data format, CSV is also widely supported by various spreadsheet applications, where one may save current model setup, exporting it to `models.csv` as necessary without even having to restart the gateway.
Additionally, as you may have seen in the example, you can specify the same model ID with different keys and endpoints, which will automatically enable same-model failover. With a hierarchical format like JSON, this setup would require extra parameter nesting or some other complications, or just making the config look much bulkier than it should.
## Credits
Created by Luxferre in 2026, released into the public domain with no warranties.
