📖 简体中文版自述文件 (README_ZH.md)

Using your own Microsoft Copilot account. No API key, no credits, no paid plan: it turns the free chat at copilot.microsoft.com into an API you can call from code.

You can use it in two ways:

• 🐍 As a Python library: just call client.chat("Hi"). Supports streaming and multi-turn conversations.
• 🔌 As a local OpenAI-compatible API: runs a server at http://localhost:8000/v1 that speaks the OpenAI format, so the official openai SDK (and any OpenAI-compatible app) works as a drop-in, with localhost in place of OpenAI.

You sign in once with your Microsoft account in a browser; your session is saved and refreshed automatically after that.

Unofficial project. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft. It automates the consumer Copilot web experience for personal use, so use it responsibly and within Microsoft's terms.

• Free: uses your normal signed-in Copilot, no API billing.
• Drop-in OpenAI replacement: point any OpenAI client at localhost and it just works.
• Works everywhere you're signed in: the signed-in path works even in regions where anonymous Copilot is blocked (e.g. India).
• Streaming + conversations: token-by-token output and multi-turn threads addressed by conversation_id.

• Python 3.9+
• A Microsoft account (the free one you use for Copilot is fine)
• Works on Windows, macOS, and Linux

# 1. Clone the project
git clone <your-repo-url>
cd Windows-Copilot-API

2. Create and activate a virtual environment

On macOS / Linux:

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

On Windows (PowerShell):

python -m venv venv
venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1

On Windows you may need to allow script execution once: Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned. In cmd.exe activate with venv\Scripts\activate.bat instead.

3. Install dependencies and sign in

# Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Install the browser Playwright needs (one-time)
playwright install chromium

# Sign in once: a browser opens, log into your Microsoft account
python -m copilot login

That's it. Your session is saved under session/ (git-ignored, never shared) and reused on every run.

💡 You can even skip the login step: the first time you call chat() or start the server, it opens the sign-in browser for you automatically.

If you are on Windows, you can bypass the manual steps above and use our smart startup script:

.\start_service.ps1

It automates the entire lifecycle:

1. Auto-Credential Diagnostics: Simulates a minimal connection to Microsoft Copilot to verify if your saved session in session/token.json is still valid.
2. Interactive Sign-in Trigger: If the credentials are expired or missing, it automatically launches a visible Chrome browser (python -m copilot login) for you to sign in.
3. Zombie Process Cleanup: Checks and force-terminates any stale python processes holding port 8000 to prevent socket binding errors.
4. Server Startup: Automatically launches the OpenAI-compatible FastAPI server and streams live logs directly to your terminal.

Prefer a container? You can run the OpenAI-compatible server in Docker once you've signed in.

Sign in on the host first. The login step above opens a visible browser, which can't run inside the headless container — so run python -m copilot login on your host to populate session/. The container mounts that folder and only does the automatic (headless) token refresh from then on.

docker compose up --build
# -> Copilot OpenAI-compatible API on http://localhost:8000

The docker-compose.yml maps port 8000 and bind-mounts your session/ so the login persists across restarts. Tune RATE_LIMIT_RPM / RATE_LIMIT_BURST there. To run without Compose, build and pass the same bindings by hand:

docker build -t windows-copilot-api .
docker run --rm -p 8000:8000 -v "$(pwd)/session:/app/session" windows-copilot-api

The simplest way if your code is already Python.

from copilot import CopilotClient

client = CopilotClient()                 # loads your signed-in session

# Get a full reply
reply = client.chat("Say hello in one short sentence.")
print(reply.text)

# Continue the SAME conversation — pass the id back
reply2 = client.chat("And now in French?", reply.conversation_id)
print(reply2.text)

# Stream the answer as it's typed
for chunk in client.stream("Tell me a short joke"):
    print(chunk, end="", flush=True)

chat() returns the full text plus a conversation_id; pass that id back to keep the thread going, or omit it to start fresh. stream() yields the reply piece by piece.

👉 More: examples/01_direct_chat.py, 02_direct_conversation.py, 03_direct_stream.py

Start a local server that speaks the OpenAI API, so existing OpenAI tools and SDKs work unchanged.

python app.py
# -> Copilot OpenAI-compatible API on http://127.0.0.1:8000

Then point any OpenAI client at it (the API key is required by the SDK but ignored):

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(base_url="http://localhost:8000/v1", api_key="unused")

resp = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="copilot-creative",  # supports: copilot (balanced), copilot-creative (creative), copilot-precise (precise)
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)

Or call it with plain HTTP / curl:

curl http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model": "copilot-creative", "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}]}'

Endpoints

Change the address with env vars: HOST=0.0.0.0 PORT=8080 python app.py, or run uvicorn server.api:app --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8080.

👉 More: examples/04_server_http.py, 05_server_stream.py, 06_server_openai_sdk.py

python -m copilot login          # sign in and save the session
python -m copilot ask "Hello!"   # quick one-shot question

The server bridges a single signed-in Copilot account, and Copilot's chat socket doesn't tolerate concurrent conversations from one process. So the server serializes upstream calls: parallel HTTP requests queue behind a lock and run one at a time (see server/api.py). This is intentional, and it means throughput is sequential, not parallel.

You can measure where it breaks with the included stress test, which fires a batch of simultaneous requests and doubles the batch size every successful round until the first error:

# Start the server in one terminal
python app.py

# Ramp concurrency in another (1 → 2 → 4 → 8 → …)
python tests/stress.py
python tests/stress.py --max 64 --timeout 120 --url http://localhost:8000

Sample run (one signed-in account):

Highest fully-successful concurrency: 4. Wall time roughly doubles each round while minimum latency stays flat (~3.5s) — the signature of a serialized queue: one request runs immediately, the rest wait their turn. The failure at 8 is an upstream 502 (Copilot rejecting requests under load), not a server crash or timeout — so the exact break point is flaky and may vary between runs.

Takeaway: keep concurrent in-flight requests low (≈ 1–4). This is a personal bridge, not a high-throughput gateway — and please don't hammer your account.

Concurrency (above) is how many at once; the rate limit is how many per minute, sustained. Microsoft publishes none for consumer Copilot, so the bridge enforces a self-imposed one with a token bucket: it caps accepted requests per minute and returns a standard 429 + Retry-After when you exceed it. Two env vars tune it:

RATE_LIMIT_RPM=20 RATE_LIMIT_BURST=5 python app.py   # raise it; 0 to disable

The default 12 rpm sits safely below the ~15 rpm where a single account starts seeing upstream 502s. To find your ceiling, run the server with the limiter off (RATE_LIMIT_RPM=0) and push the probe until failures appear:

python tests/ratelimit.py --rpm 20 --minutes 3

On the client side, use exponential backoff. Both 429 (bridge limit) and the occasional 502 (Copilot upstream hiccup) are transient — retry with growing delays (e.g. 1s, 2s, 4s) and they almost always clear. The official openai SDK does this automatically and honours Retry-After; with plain HTTP, add a few retries yourself.

• Sign in once, then reuse. The cached token refreshes automatically; you only re-sign-in if the session fully expires.
• No daily limit, but be reasonable. Microsoft doesn't impose a daily chat cap, but please use it in moderation, and don't spam or hammer it with automated bulk requests.
• One model. Copilot has no model picker, so the server advertises a single model named copilot.
• Roughly GPT-4 class. On GPQA Diamond (198 graduate-level questions, closed-book) it scores 40.9%, which puts it in the GPT-4 family rather than the reasoning tier (o1/o3). Measured with tests/gpqa_bench.py.
• Your session is private. Everything in session/ (cookies + token) stays on your machine and is git-ignored.

RuntimeError: Copilot error: invalid-event (or the chat hangs) on a server/VPS. On datacenter IPs Cloudflare withholds bot-clearance, so the chat socket stalls on an empty challenge sometimes. Fix it manually: on that machine, open copilot.microsoft.com in a browser and pass the "verify you're human" check once; that sets a cf_clearance cookie which the saved session reuses. Re-do it if it expires, or route the server's traffic through a residential connection (e.g. a home-PC exit node).

socks5h:// proxy and WebSocket connection failures (WinError 10061 / TLS connect error): Windows proxy clients may automatically configure socks5h:// in environmental variables. The library's underlying curl_cffi cannot resolve wss:// handshakes over socks5h directly. The bridge now automatically normalizes socks5h:// to socks5:// in its driver and browser module to prevent this failure.

UnicodeEncodeError: 'gbk' codec can't encode character... when printing replies on Windows console: When driving the API under the default Windows Command Prompt or PowerShell, printing replies that contain emoji characters (like 🍎) can trigger encoding errors and break the websocket thread. The driver now automatically configures standard I/O streams with robust replacement settings (sys.stdout.reconfigure(errors="replace")), making it fully immune to console encoding crashes.

For personal and educational use. You are responsible for complying with Microsoft's terms of service.