---
date: "2025-01-01T20:54:58.000Z"
title: "2025-01-01"
tags: ["cursor","openrouter","deepseek"]
draft: false
---

I tried two separate ways to configure [Cursor](https://www.cursor.com/) to point to an alternative OpenAI compliant API endpoint by modifying the "OpenAI API Key > Override OpenAI Base URL" section of the Cursor settings.

My first attempt was with Deepseek, using [learnings](/til/llm/openai-compatible-apis) from wiring that up to `llm`.
I got to the point where Cursor failed to validate the API endpoint (don't forget to save the url override), but the `curl` command it output for me to check manually worked if I switched the model to `deepseek-chat`.

```sh
curl https://api.deepseek.com/v1/chat/completions -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" -d '{
  "messages": [
    {
      "role": "system",
      "content": "You are a test assistant."
    },
    {
      "role": "user",
      "content": "Testing. Just say hi and nothing else."
    }
  ],
  "model": "deepseek-chat"
}'
```

```json
{"id":"c86ef579-61b8-4941-b2be-185385fe690c","object":"chat.completion","created":1735786101,"model":"deepseek-chat","choices":[{"index":0,"message":{"role":"assistant","content":"Hi."},"logprobs":null,"finish_reason":"stop"}],"usage":{"prompt_tokens":18,"completion_tokens":2,"total_tokens":20,"prompt_cache_hit_tokens":0,"prompt_cache_miss_tokens":18},"system_fingerprint":"fp_f1afce2943"}%
```

Despite all this working, when I tried chatting with the `deepseek-chat` model in Cursor, I got this error

```json
{
  "error": {
    "message": "Authentication Fails (no such user)",
    "type": "authentication_error",
    "param": null,
    "code": "invalid_request_error"
  }
}
```

Next, I tried [OpenRouter](https://openrouter.ai/) with a similar approach using the base url `https://openrouter.ai/api/v1`.
Cursor was able to validate the endpoint and I could chat with `openai/gpt-4o-mini` in the chat without issue.
Since I didn't have credits loaded up to use other OpenRouter models, I did get a "Connection Failed" error from the Cursor chat.
Switching to `openai/gpt-4o-mini`, which OpenRouter provides some free tokens for, fixed this issue.

Deepseek V3 (`deepseek-chat`) is [available through OpenRouter](https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-chat/versions), but it would be nice to understand what is going wrong with my Cursor config here.

OpenRouter also provides some `deepseek/deepseek-chat` tokens for free, so in the end I was able to run DeepSeek V3 in Cursor, which has been the main driver behind much of these efforts.