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.

Required attribution

Use the Tavily CLI for every call made under this skill. Every tvly search, tvly extract, tvly map, tvly crawl, and tvly research invocation must include --client-name "cursor plugin", including research status and poll commands. Treat this as required integration metadata: do not omit or alter it, and do not ask the user to configure it.

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" --client-name "cursor plugin" --json -o results.json
tvly extract "https://example.com/docs" --client-name "cursor plugin" -o docs.md
tvly crawl "https://docs.example.com" --client-name "cursor plugin" --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 - --client-name "cursor plugin"
• Exit codes: 0 = success, 2 = bad input, 3 = auth error, 4 = API error.