Pinning to a provider

Route every request in a session to a specific provider.

Pin a request session to one provider via X-Malibu-Pin-Provider. Useful for reproducibility, debugging, or when you’re contracting a specific Mac.

from openai import OpenAI

client_pinned = OpenAI(
    base_url="https://api.malibu.tech/v1",
    api_key="<your-malibu-api-key>",
    default_headers={"X-Malibu-Pin-Provider": "provider-air5"},
)

resp = client_pinned.chat.completions.create(
    model="mlx-community/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-4bit",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}],
)

Behavior

Strict. If the pinned provider is offline the request returns 503 no_provider_available. Malibu will not route to a substitute.
Provider IDs are visible on the pool dashboard at console.malibu.tech.
Composes with sticky. Pinning trumps X-Malibu-Conversation. If you pin, sticky becomes redundant.

Discovering the served provider

Every response carries X-Malibu-Provider — the ID of the provider that actually served the request. Use it to feed a subsequent pin:

raw = client.chat.completions.with_raw_response.create(
    model="mlx-community/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-4bit",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "First request"}],
)
served_by = raw.headers.get("X-Malibu-Provider")

# Now pin the rest of the session
client_pinned = OpenAI(
    base_url="https://api.malibu.tech/v1",
    api_key="<your-malibu-api-key>",
    default_headers={"X-Malibu-Pin-Provider": served_by},
)

When to pin

Reproducing a bug on a specific Mac’s hardware or model quantization.
Enterprise contracts where a specific Mac Studio is dedicated to a buyer.
Benchmarking — comparing responses across providers by pinning each in turn.

For latency-sensitive multi-turn conversations, prefer sticky conversations — you get prefix-cache reuse without the strictness of a pin.

Sticky conversations Payments & payouts

Litepaper

Getting started

API reference

Network & trust

Guides

Agentic tooling

CLI reference

Operations

Ledger

Pinning to a provider

Pinning to a provider

Behavior

Discovering the served provider

When to pin

​Pinning to a provider

​Behavior

​Discovering the served provider

​When to pin

Pinning to a provider

Behavior

Discovering the served provider

When to pin