exa-cli

Simple agent-first CLI wrapper around the Exa Search API (not to be confused with the exa terminal replacement for ls).

Run

npx exa-cli --help

# Install globally
npm install -g exa-cli

exa search "DigiKey link for Noridc NRF54L15"  # Outputs JSON

Commands

• search - semantic search (optionally return contents)
• contents - fetch page contents for URLs
• find-similar - find similar links to a URL
• answer - Q&A grounded by search results

Agent Skill

This repo includes an Agent Skill for Claude Code and similar environments:

• skills/exa-search/SKILL.md

Examples

Search:

exa search "latest developments in quantum computing"
exa search "AI chips roadmap" --type deep --additional-query "GPU roadmap" --num-results 25
exa search "LLM hallucinations" --include-domain arxiv.org --text --text-max-characters 2000

Find similar:

exa find-similar https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.06435 --num-results 5 --text
exa find-similar https://example.com --exclude-domain example.com --summary

Contents:

exa contents https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.06435 --text --summary --summary-query "key findings"
exa contents https://example.com --highlights --highlights-per-url 2 --highlights-num-sentences 2

Answer:

exa answer "What is the population of New York City?"
exa answer "state of solid-state batteries" --stream

Plain output (stable lines for agents):

exa search "openai" --num-results 3 --plain
exa find-similar https://openai.com --num-results 3 --plain
exa contents https://openai.com --plain
exa answer "What is the capital of France?" --plain

Dry run (prints request JSON):

exa search "openai" --num-results 1 --dry-run
exa contents https://openai.com --text --dry-run

Auth

Set your API key in the environment:

export EXA_API_KEY=...

Development

bun install
bun run build
bun run dev -- --help
bun run lint
bun run format

Output modes

• Default is JSON to stdout
• --plain emits stable, line-based output
• Errors go to stderr (JSON when not using --plain)