Provider: Anthropic Claude

"model": { "provider": "anthropic" }, with any knowledge (knowledge.retrieval: HelpPuff's own by default, or ai-search). See Models and providers. Older projects' "backend": { "type": "anthropic" } is converted by helppuff upgrade.

Answers with Claude (the Messages API, through Anthropic's official SDK). Claude has no hosted retrieval, so knowledge comes from Cloudflare AI Search or from HelpPuff's own knowledge base.

Set up

Get a key at console.anthropic.com, then:

npx @knowtific/helppuff init --url acme.com --backend anthropic --api-key "$ANTHROPIC_API_KEY"

"backend": {
  "type": "anthropic",
  "model": "claude-opus-5",
  "apiKey": { "env": "ANTHROPIC_API_KEY" },
  "retrieval": "helppuff"
}

Option	Default
model	claude-opus-5	Any Claude model. A smaller, faster model (e.g. Sonnet or Haiku) suits most chat
apiKey	{ "env": "ANTHROPIC_API_KEY" }	By environment variable name
effort	—	low … max: how hard Claude thinks before answering. Lower is faster and cheaper
retrieval	—	"helppuff": ground answers in HelpPuff's knowledge base (recommended)
knowledge	on when there is knowledge	Ground answers in Cloudflare AI Search
instance, endpoint	—	Which AI Search instance, as for the Cloudflare AI Search backend

Knowledge

HelpPuff's knowledge base ("retrieval": "helppuff", recommended): your site and files are learned into Vectorize and D1 on your Cloudflare account, with the dashboard's knowledge tools; the passages are added to Claude's system prompt and the sources come back as links.

Cloudflare AI Search (without retrieval): an AI Search instance is created or reused as for the cloudflare backend, and its results ground Claude's answers.

Notes

• prompt.md is the system prompt, versioned as usual.
• The conversation is kept in KV per session (the last 24 turns) and sent with each message, since the Messages API is stateless.
• The rich-message tools are declared as Claude tools and rendered, never executed.
• The Worker runs with the nodejs_compat flag, which the SDK needs; deploy sets it.