tavily-cli

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.

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.