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Claude Code reads ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN and ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL from the environment. Point those at Wardin and every Claude Code session is automatically tracked, budgeted, and policy-enforced — no changes to how your team uses Claude Code.

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Setup

export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=wardin_sk_YOUR_KEY
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://gw.wardin.ai
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY works too — the gateway accepts both the Authorization: Bearer and x-api-key auth headers. ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN is preferred for gateways because Claude Code treats it as a proxy credential and won’t prompt about a custom API key.
Add these to your shell profile (~/.zshrc, ~/.bashrc) or your team’s shared environment setup. You can also set them per-project using a .env file (never commit it) or your shell’s direnv setup.

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What gets tracked

Once routed through Wardin, every Claude Code request appears in the dashboard with:
  • Token usage — input, output, cache creation, cache read (split correctly for Claude Code’s prompt-caching-heavy workload)
  • Cost — broken down by token type
  • Session grouping — Claude Code requests are grouped into sessions automatically using idle-timeout bucketing (30-minute sliding window). One coding task = one session.
  • Model — which Claude model was used for each request

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Issuing team keys

Create one virtual key per developer: 
# Create a key for each developer
curl -X POST https://api.wardin.ai/v1/keys \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer wardin_sk_ADMIN_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "alice-claude-code",
    "monthlyBudgetUsd": 100,
    "ownerId": "user_alice_id"
  }'
Send each developer their wardin_sk_ key. They set ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=wardin_sk_... and nothing else changes. (Keys can also be created in the dashboard: Console → Keys & Limits.)

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CI / headless usage

For CI pipelines, create a separate key with its own budget pool: 
curl -X POST https://api.wardin.ai/v1/keys \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer wardin_sk_ADMIN_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "ci-claude-code",
    "monthlyBudgetUsd": 200,
    "rpmLimit": 20
  }'
CI keys return structured JSON errors on 429/403 — no HTML, no human-readable pages.

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Model allowlist for Claude Code

If you want to restrict Claude Code to specific models (e.g., block Opus for cost control): 
curl -X POST https://api.wardin.ai/v1/policies \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer wardin_sk_ADMIN_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "claude-code-models",
    "type": "model_allowlist",
    "config": {
      "models": ["claude-sonnet-4-6", "claude-haiku-4-5"]
    }
  }'
Claude Code will receive a 403 with a clear error message if it attempts to use a blocked model.

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Session attribution in the dashboard

Claude Code doesn’t send a session ID by default. Wardin groups consecutive requests (< 30 minutes apart) into sessions automatically. You can also set a session ID explicitly via Claude Code’s custom-headers variable: 
export ANTHROPIC_CUSTOM_HEADERS="X-Wardin-Session-Id: my-task-$(date +%s)"
ANTHROPIC_CUSTOM_HEADERS is a Claude Code convention that attaches extra headers to every API request. Wardin trusts an explicit X-Wardin-Session-Id as-is; without it, the idle-timeout bucketing applies.