ReddRadar
Agent skill
exa-hello-world
Create a minimal working Exa search example with real results. Use when starting a new Exa integration, testing your setup, or learning basic search, searchAndContents, and findSimilar patterns. Trigger with phrases like "exa hello world", "exa example", "exa quick start", "simple exa search", "first exa query".
Install this agent skill to your Project
npx add-skill https://github.com/jeremylongshore/claude-code-plugins-plus-skills/tree/main/plugins/saas-packs/exa-pack/skills/exa-hello-world
SKILL.md
Exa Hello World
Overview
Minimal working examples demonstrating all core Exa search operations: basic search, search with contents, find similar, and get contents. Each example is runnable standalone.
Prerequisites
exa-jsSDK installed (npm install exa-js)EXA_API_KEYenvironment variable set- Node.js 18+ with ES module support
Instructions
Step 1: Basic Search (Metadata Only)
import Exa from "exa-js";
const exa = new Exa(process.env.EXA_API_KEY);
// Basic search returns URLs, titles, and scores — no page content
const results = await exa.search("best practices for building RAG pipelines", {
type: "auto", // auto | neural | keyword | fast | instant
numResults: 5,
});
for (const r of results.results) {
console.log(`[${r.score.toFixed(2)}] ${r.title}`);
console.log(` ${r.url}`);
}
Step 2: Search with Contents
// searchAndContents returns text, highlights, and/or summary with each result
const results = await exa.searchAndContents(
"how transformers work in large language models",
{
type: "neural",
numResults: 3,
text: { maxCharacters: 1000 },
highlights: { maxCharacters: 500, query: "attention mechanism" },
summary: { query: "explain transformers simply" },
}
);
for (const r of results.results) {
console.log(`## ${r.title}`);
console.log(`URL: ${r.url}`);
console.log(`Summary: ${r.summary}`);
console.log(`Text preview: ${r.text?.substring(0, 200)}...`);
console.log(`Highlights: ${r.highlights?.join(" | ")}`);
console.log();
}
Step 3: Find Similar Pages
// findSimilar takes a URL and returns semantically similar pages
const similar = await exa.findSimilarAndContents(
"https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00234",
{
numResults: 5,
text: { maxCharacters: 500 },
excludeSourceDomain: true,
}
);
console.log("Pages similar to the seed URL:");
for (const r of similar.results) {
console.log(` ${r.title} — ${r.url}`);
}
Step 4: Get Contents for Known URLs
// getContents retrieves page content for specific URLs
const contents = await exa.getContents(
["https://example.com/article-1", "https://example.com/article-2"],
{
text: { maxCharacters: 2000 },
highlights: { maxCharacters: 500 },
livecrawl: "preferred",
livecrawlTimeout: 10000,
}
);
for (const r of contents.results) {
console.log(`${r.title}: ${r.text?.length} chars retrieved`);
}
Output
- Working TypeScript file with Exa client initialization
- Search results printed to console with titles, URLs, and scores
- Content extraction (text, highlights, summary) demonstrated
- Similarity search results from a seed URL
Error Handling
| Error | HTTP Code | Cause | Solution |
|---|---|---|---|
INVALID_API_KEY |
401 | API key missing or invalid | Check EXA_API_KEY env var |
INVALID_REQUEST_BODY |
400 | Malformed parameters | Verify parameter types match SDK docs |
NO_MORE_CREDITS |
402 | Account credits depleted | Top up at dashboard.exa.ai |
429 Too Many Requests |
429 | Rate limit exceeded | Wait and retry; default is 10 QPS |
Empty results array |
200 | Query too narrow or filters too strict | Broaden query or relax date/domain filters |
Examples
Complete Runnable Script
import Exa from "exa-js";
const exa = new Exa(process.env.EXA_API_KEY);
async function main() {
// 1. Search
const search = await exa.search("AI safety research", { numResults: 3 });
console.log(`Found ${search.results.length} results\n`);
// 2. Search with contents
const detailed = await exa.searchAndContents("AI safety research", {
numResults: 2,
text: true,
highlights: { maxCharacters: 300 },
});
console.log("First result text length:", detailed.results[0]?.text?.length);
// 3. Find similar
if (search.results[0]) {
const similar = await exa.findSimilar(search.results[0].url, {
numResults: 3,
});
console.log("\nSimilar pages:", similar.results.map(r => r.title));
}
}
main().catch(console.error);
Resources
Next Steps
Proceed to exa-core-workflow-a for neural search patterns or exa-sdk-patterns for production-ready code.
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