Use Claude Code with Heroku AI

Last updated February 25, 2026

Claude Code can use Heroku Managed Inference and Agents as a backend to power model inference.

Claude Code support with Heroku AI is dependent on the Messages API Preview and is therefore in preview.

Prerequisites

Before configuring Claude Code, you need:

  • A Heroku app with the Managed Inference addon provisioned using the standard plan:

    heroku addons:create heroku-inference:standard -a $APP_NAME

    Claude Code uses multiple models to operate, therefore model-specific addon plans (like heroku-inference:claude-3-7-sonnet) are not supported.

  • A Heroku Managed Inference and Agents API token:

    heroku config:get INFERENCE_KEY

  • Claude Code installed and initialized (see Claude Code Quickstart)

Configuration

Now, set the required configuration for Claude Code using environment variables or Claude Code’s configuration files.

To do this with environment variables, use the following:

export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN="$YOUR_API_TOKEN"
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL="https://us.inference.heroku.com"

Alternatively, edit your Claude Code configuration (typically at ~/.claude/settings.json) with the following:

"env": {
    "ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN"="your-api-token",
    "ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL"="https://us.inference.heroku.com"
}

Verification

Test your configuration by running a Claude Code command:

claude-code --model claude-opus-4-6 "What is 1 + 2?"

If successful, Claude Code returns a response from your configured model.

Available Models

We suggest the latest Anthropic models for use with Claude Code. Please see Supported Models for up-to-date information on which Anthropic models are supported on Heroku Managed Inference.