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tavily-cli

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tavily-ai/skillscli.tavily.com
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Install

npx skills add https://github.com/tavily-ai/skills --skill tavily-cli

Use with your agent

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Install the tavily-cli skill, then use it as build context. Run: npx skills add https://github.com/tavily-ai/skills --skill tavily-cli. Then read the installed skill.md and follow its guidance to build or refactor my project.

Tavily CLI

Web search, content extraction, site crawling, URL discovery, and deep research. Returns JSON optimized for LLM consumption.

Run tvly --help or tvly <command> --help for full option details.

Prerequisites

Must be installed and authenticated. Check with tvly --status.

tavily v0.1.0

> Authenticated via OAuth (tvly login)

If not ready:

curl -fsSL https://cli.tavily.com/install.sh | bash

Or manually: uv tool install tavily-cli / pip install tavily-cli

Then authenticate:

tvly login --api-key tvly-YOUR_KEY
# or: export TAVILY_API_KEY=tvly-YOUR_KEY
# or: tvly login  (opens browser for OAuth)

Workflow

Follow this escalation pattern — start simple, escalate when needed:

  1. Search — No specific URL. Find pages, answer questions, discover sources.
  2. Extract — Have a URL. Pull its content directly.
  3. Map — Large site, need to find the right page. Discover URLs first.
  4. Crawl — Need bulk content from an entire site section.
  5. Research — Need comprehensive, multi-source analysis with citations.
NeedCommandWhen
Find pages on a topictvly searchNo specific URL yet
Get a page's contenttvly extractHave a URL
Find URLs within a sitetvly mapNeed to locate a specific subpage
Bulk extract a site sectiontvly crawlNeed many pages (e.g., all /docs/)
Deep research with citationstvly researchNeed multi-source synthesis

For detailed command reference, use the individual skill for each command (e.g., tavily-search, tavily-crawl) or run tvly <command> --help.

Output

All commands support --json for structured, machine-readable output and -o to save to a file.

tvly search "react hooks" --json -o results.json
tvly extract "https://example.com/docs" -o docs.md
tvly crawl "https://docs.example.com" --output-dir ./docs/

Tips

  • Always quote URLs — shell interprets ? and & as special characters.
  • Use --json for agentic workflows — every command supports it.
  • Read from stdin with - — echo "query" | tvly search -
  • Exit codes: 0 = success, 2 = bad input, 3 = auth error, 4 = API error.