tavily-cli

Name: tavily-cli
Author: tavily-ai

Web search, content extraction, site crawling, and deep research via Tavily CLI. Five command modes covering search, extraction, URL discovery, bulk crawling, and multi-source research with citations All commands support JSON output and file saving for structured, agentic workflows Escalation pattern guides you from simple search through extraction, mapping, crawling, to comprehensive research based on your needs Requires tavily-cli installation and API key authentication via tvly login

INSTALLATION

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

Run in your project or agent environment. Adjust flags if your CLI version differs.

SKILL.md

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:

Search — No specific URL. Find pages, answer questions, discover sources.

Extract — Have a URL. Pull its content directly.

Map — Large site, need to find the right page. Discover URLs first.

Crawl — Need bulk content from an entire site section.

Research — Need comprehensive, multi-source analysis with citations.

Need

Command

When

Find pages on a topic

tvly search

No specific URL yet

Get a page's content

tvly extract

Have a URL

Find URLs within a site

tvly map

Need to locate a specific subpage

Bulk extract a site section

tvly crawl

Need many pages (e.g., all /docs/)

Deep research with citations

tvly research

Need 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.