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.

bash

tavily v0.1.0

> Authenticated via OAuth (tvly login)

If not ready:

bash

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

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

Then authenticate:

bash

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.

bash

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.