NS Grok Client

NS Grok Client is the credential node for the Grok half of symbiotica-ai/comfyui-nodes. It takes your xAI API key and outputs a GROK_API_CLIENT - an opaque object you wire into NS Grok Imagine Image and NS Grok Imagine Video. It does no generation itself. Its whole job is to make the key appear once, in one place, instead of pasted into every node.

That's the pattern worth understanding: this is an API-wrapper setup, exactly the "the model isn't on your machine" category from docs/knowledge/external-api-nodes.md. Grok Imagine is a closed xAI model - you cannot download it, there's no local checkpoint, and the only door is the API. So the client node exists because the pack has multiple Grok nodes and you shouldn't have to type your key into each one (or, worse, save it in a workflow file you might share).

How the key gets resolved

The api_key widget is the first stop. If it's empty, the node falls back in order: the pack's Settings UI (search "Symbiotica" in Settings, stored in your local comfy.settings.json - not in the workflow), then config.ini in the pack root, then the XAI_API_KEY environment variable. So the clean setups are: paste into Settings once, or export XAI_API_KEY=..., and never touch a key in a workflow again.

One output: client (GROK_API_CLIENT), which feeds the two imagine nodes.

Install

Ships with symbiotica-ai/comfyui-nodes - ComfyUI Manager search "Symbiotica", or clone + pip install -r requirements.txt. No ffmpeg, no models. Get a key from https://console.x.ai - Grok Imagine is paid per generation, so the key needs billing attached.

Gotchas

The client output is a dictionary wrapper around your key, so treat it like a credential: don't stash a workflow containing a wired client into a public repo, because the key rides along in it. If a downstream Grok node fails with an auth error, the fix is almost always here - either the key is wrong, or the widget is empty and no fallback was found (there's no silent fallback; it'll tell you which path it couldn't resolve). And the client is provider-specific: it only satisfies the Grok nodes, not the pack's LLM chat or Gemini nodes, which resolve their own keys their own way.