Groq Multi-Environment Setup

Overview

Configure Groq API access across development, staging, and production with the right model, rate limit strategy, and secret management per environment. Key insight: use llama-3.1-8b-instant in development (cheapest, fastest), match production model in staging, and harden production with retries and fallbacks.

Prerequisites

• A Groq account with API keys from console.groq.com/keys — ideally a separate key (or organization) per environment.
• Node project with the groq-sdk package installed (npm install groq-sdk).
• NODE_ENV set per environment (development / staging / production).
• A secret store for staging/production keys: GitHub Actions secrets, AWS Secrets Manager, GCP Secret Manager, or HashiCorp Vault.

Environment Strategy

Instructions

The full, copy-paste implementation lives in the reference files — this section is the map. Read [the implementation walkthrough](references/implementation.md) for the code module, service wrapper, and verify script, and [secrets & deployment](references/secrets-and-deployment.md) for per-platform key management, Docker Compose profiles, and rate-limit inspection.

1. Build the config module (config/groq.ts). One configs record keyed by

environment resolves model, token budget, retries, timeout, and logging, then validates that a key is present with an environment-specific error message. The essential skeleton:

``typescript const configs: Record<string, GroqEnvConfig> = { development: { model: "llama-3.1-8b-instant", maxRetries: 1, logRequests: true, / ... / }, staging: { model: "llama-3.3-70b-versatile", maxRetries: 3, logRequests: false, / ... / }, production: { model: "llama-3.3-70b-versatile", maxRetries: 5, logRequests: false, / ... / }, }; export function getGroqConfig(): GroqEnvConfig { return configs[process.env.NODE_ENV || "development"] || configs.development; } ``

See [implementation.md § Step 1](references/implementation.md) for the full module including key validation and the memoized getGroqClient().

1. Wire an environment-aware service (services/groq-service.ts) that reads

the resolved config, logs only when logRequests is on, and surfaces the retry-after header on 429. Full code in [implementation.md § Step 2](references/implementation.md).

1. Source secrets per platform. Dev reads a git-ignored .env.local; staging

uses CI/CD secrets; production pulls from a secret manager. Commands for GitHub Actions, AWS, GCP, and Vault are in [secrets-and-deployment.md § Step 3](references/secrets-and-deployment.md).

1. Deploy with Docker Compose profiles so each environment injects its own

key (env var for dev/staging, external Docker secret for prod). See [secrets-and-deployment.md § Step 4](references/secrets-and-deployment.md).

1. Verify each environment with scripts/verify-groq-env.ts, which prints the

resolved model/retries and does a live round-trip. Full script in [implementation.md § Step 5](references/implementation.md).

1. Inspect rate limits per key via the x-ratelimit-* response headers — see

[secrets-and-deployment.md § Step 6](references/secrets-and-deployment.md).

Output

After setup, each environment resolves its own Groq configuration and the verify script confirms a live connection. Expected output from verify-groq-env.ts in production:

Environment: production
Model: llama-3.3-70b-versatile
Max retries: 5
API key prefix: gsk_AbCd...
Connection: OK (312ms)
Model response: OK

You end with: a config/groq.ts that selects model/retries/logging by NODE_ENV, a service wrapper that logs verbosely only in dev, per-environment keys sourced from the right secret store, and Docker Compose profiles that never leak a production key into the process environment.

Error Handling

Examples

Resolve the config for the current environment:

import { getGroqConfig } from "./config/groq";

const config = getGroqConfig();      // picks dev/staging/prod by NODE_ENV
console.log(config.model);           // "llama-3.1-8b-instant" in dev

Complete a chat with the environment default model:

import { complete } from "./services/groq-service";

const answer = await complete([{ role: "user", content: "Summarize in one line." }]);

Verify production before a deploy:

NODE_ENV=production GROQ_API_KEY_PROD=gsk_... npx tsx scripts/verify-groq-env.ts

Full, runnable versions of every snippet are in [implementation.md](references/implementation.md) and [secrets-and-deployment.md](references/secrets-and-deployment.md).

Resources

• Groq Console
• Groq API Keys
• Groq Rate Limits
• Groq Spend Limits
• [Implementation walkthrough](references/implementation.md) — config module, service, verify script
• [Secrets & deployment](references/secrets-and-deployment.md) — secret managers, Docker Compose, rate limits

Next Steps

For deployment configuration, see the groq-deploy-integration skill, which builds on this environment strategy to wire CI/CD deploy pipelines and health checks.