Streaming

LangChain implements a streaming system to surface real-time updates.

Streaming is crucial for enhancing the responsiveness of applications built on LLMs. By displaying output progressively, even before a complete response is ready, streaming significantly improves user experience (UX), particularly when dealing with the latency of LLMs.

Overview

LangChain’s streaming system lets you surface live feedback from agent runs to your application.

What’s possible with LangChain streaming:

• Stream agent progress — get state updates after each agent step.
• Stream LLM tokens — stream language model tokens as they’re generated.
• Stream custom updates — emit user-defined signals (e.g., "Fetched 10/100 records").
• Stream multiple modes — choose from updates (agent progress), messages (LLM tokens + metadata), or custom (arbitrary user data).

Agent progress

To stream agent progress, use the stream method with streamMode: "updates". This emits an event after every agent step.

For example, if you have an agent that calls a tool once, you should see the following updates:

• LLM node: AIMessage with tool call requests
• Tool node: @[ToolMessage] with execution result
• LLM node: Final AI response

import z from "zod";
import { createAgent, tool } from "langchain";

const getWeather = tool(
    async ({ city }) => {
        return `The weather in ${city} is always sunny!`;
    },
    {
        name: "get_weather",
        description: "Get weather for a given city.",
        schema: z.object({
        city: z.string(),
        }),
    }
);

const agent = createAgent({
    model: "gpt-5-nano",
    tools: [getWeather],
});

for await (const chunk of await agent.stream(
    { messages: [{ role: "user", content: "what is the weather in sf" }] },
    { streamMode: "updates" }
)) {
    const [step, content] = Object.entries(chunk)[0];
    console.log(`step: ${step}`);
    console.log(`content: ${JSON.stringify(content, null, 2)}`);
}
/**
 * step: model
 * content: {
 *   "messages": [
 *     {
 *       "kwargs": {
 *         // ...
 *         "tool_calls": [
 *           {
 *             "name": "get_weather",
 *             "args": {
 *               "city": "San Francisco"
 *             },
 *             "type": "tool_call",
 *             "id": "call_0qLS2Jp3MCmaKJ5MAYtr4jJd"
 *           }
 *         ],
 *         // ...
 *       }
 *     }
 *   ]
 * }
 * step: tools
 * content: {
 *   "messages": [
 *     {
 *       "kwargs": {
 *         "content": "The weather in San Francisco is always sunny!",
 *         "name": "get_weather",
 *         // ...
 *       }
 *     }
 *   ]
 * }
 * step: model
 * content: {
 *   "messages": [
 *     {
 *       "kwargs": {
 *         "content": "The latest update says: The weather in San Francisco is always sunny!\n\nIf you'd like real-time details (current temperature, humidity, wind, and today's forecast), I can pull the latest data for you. Want me to fetch that?",
 *         // ...
 *       }
 *     }
 *   ]
 * }
 */

LLM tokens

To stream tokens as they are produced by the LLM, use streamMode: "messages":

import z from "zod";
import { createAgent, tool } from "langchain";

const getWeather = tool(
    async ({ city }) => {
        return `The weather in ${city} is always sunny!`;
    },
    {
        name: "get_weather",
        description: "Get weather for a given city.",
        schema: z.object({
        city: z.string(),
        }),
    }
);

const agent = createAgent({
    model: "gpt-4o-mini",
    tools: [getWeather],
});

for await (const [token, metadata] of await agent.stream(
    { messages: [{ role: "user", content: "what is the weather in sf" }] },
    { streamMode: "messages" }
)) {
    console.log(`node: ${metadata.langgraph_node}`);
    console.log(`content: ${JSON.stringify(token.contentBlocks, null, 2)}`);
}

Custom updates

To stream updates from tools as they are executed, you can use the writer parameter from the configuration.

import z from "zod";
import { tool, createAgent } from "langchain";
import { LangGraphRunnableConfig } from "@langchain/langgraph";

const getWeather = tool(
    async (input, config: LangGraphRunnableConfig) => {
        // Stream any arbitrary data
        config.writer?.(`Looking up data for city: ${input.city}`);
        // ... fetch city data
        config.writer?.(`Acquired data for city: ${input.city}`);
        return `It's always sunny in ${input.city}!`;
    },
    {
        name: "get_weather",
        description: "Get weather for a given city.",
        schema: z.object({
        city: z.string().describe("The city to get weather for."),
        }),
    }
);

const agent = createAgent({
    model: "gpt-4o-mini",
    tools: [getWeather],
});

for await (const chunk of await agent.stream(
    { messages: [{ role: "user", content: "what is the weather in sf" }] },
    { streamMode: "custom" }
)) {
    console.log(chunk);
}

Output

Looking up data for city: San Francisco
Acquired data for city: San Francisco

If you add the writer parameter to your tool, you won’t be able to invoke the tool outside of a LangGraph execution context without providing a writer function.

Stream multiple modes

You can specify multiple streaming modes by passing streamMode as an array: streamMode: ["updates", "messages", "custom"]:

import z from "zod";
import { tool, createAgent } from "langchain";
import { LangGraphRunnableConfig } from "@langchain/langgraph";

const getWeather = tool(
    async (input, config: LangGraphRunnableConfig) => {
        // Stream any arbitrary data
        config.writer?.(`Looking up data for city: ${input.city}`);
        // ... fetch city data
        config.writer?.(`Acquired data for city: ${input.city}`);
        return `It's always sunny in ${input.city}!`;
    },
    {
        name: "get_weather",
        description: "Get weather for a given city.",
        schema: z.object({
        city: z.string().describe("The city to get weather for."),
        }),
    }
);

const agent = createAgent({
    model: "gpt-4o-mini",
    tools: [getWeather],
});

for await (const [streamMode, chunk] of await agent.stream(
    { messages: [{ role: "user", content: "what is the weather in sf" }] },
    { streamMode: ["updates", "messages", "custom"] }
)) {
    console.log(`${streamMode}: ${JSON.stringify(chunk, null, 2)}`);
}

Disable streaming

In some applications you might need to disable streaming of individual tokens for a given model.

This is useful in multi-agent systems to control which agents stream their output.

See the Models guide to learn how to disable streaming.

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