exa-web-search-cli

An Amp agent skill that gives coding agents web search and page fetching via Exa's REST API using plain curl.

Why?

Many coding agents (Letta, custom agents, self-hosted setups) don't support MCP (Model Context Protocol). The official exa-mcp-server only works with MCP-compatible clients like Claude Desktop, Cursor, and VS Code.

This skill provides the same two default tools — web_search_exa and web_fetch_exa — as direct curl commands against the Exa REST API. No MCP required. Just curl and an API key.

What's included

Tool	Endpoint	Description
web_search_exa	POST /search	Semantic web search with highlighted snippets
web_fetch_exa	POST /contents	Fetch full text from known URLs

The curl commands produce identical requests to what the MCP server sends internally.

Installation

Via git (global, all projects)

git clone https://github.com/kenneropia/exa-web-search-cli.git ~/.config/agents/skills/exa-web-search

Via git (project-specific)

git clone https://github.com/kenneropia/exa-web-search-cli.git .agents/skills/exa-web-search

Manual

Copy SKILL.md into either:

• ~/.config/agents/skills/exa-web-search/SKILL.md (global)
• .agents/skills/exa-web-search/SKILL.md (project)

Setup

1. Get your API key at https://dashboard.exa.ai/api-keys
2. Add to your shell profile (~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc):

export EXA_API_KEY="your-api-key-here"

3. Restart your terminal or run source ~/.zshrc

Quick test

curl -s -X POST 'https://api.exa.ai/search' \
  -H "x-api-key: $EXA_API_KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "query": "hello world",
    "type": "auto",
    "numResults": 1,
    "contents": { "highlights": { "query": "hello world" } }
  }' | jq '.results[] | {title, url}'

License

MIT