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Cline is an AI coding agent that runs inside VS Code. You can point it at Consus Gateway to get Claude in your editor while keeping all traffic within government-authorized cloud infrastructure.

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1. Set Up Your API Key

You’ll enter your Consus Gateway API key as a custom header in the Cline settings panel (no environment variable needed).

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2. Configure Cline

Open VS Code and click the Cline icon in the sidebar. In the settings panel at the top of the Cline view:
  1. Set API Provider to OpenAI Compatible
  2. Set Base URL to https://api.consus.io/v1
  3. Set API Key to any non-empty placeholder such as dummy. Consus reads your key from the x-api-key header (step 4 below), not this field, but Cline requires it to be non-empty.
  4. Under Custom Headers, add a header with name x-api-key and your Consus Gateway API key as the value
Important: Consus Gateway authenticates via the x-api-key custom header, so that header must hold your real key. The API Key field is required by Cline but ignored by the gateway, so any non-empty placeholder (such as dummy) works there. The header name must be exactly x-api-key (all lowercase, with hyphens); a typo like x-api-ky will result in a 403 error with no error body.
  1. Set Model ID to any composite model ID from the Models page. For example, gpt-5.4:itar.
Click Save to apply.

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3. Start Coding

Open a task in Cline and start prompting. All requests route through Consus Gateway to government-authorized cloud infrastructure. Streaming, tool use (file reads, writes, terminal commands, browser actions), and multi-turn conversations all work out of the box.