Exa Production Checklist

Overview

Complete checklist for deploying Exa search integrations to production. Covers API key management, error handling verification, performance baselines, monitoring, and rollback procedures.

Pre-Deployment Checklist

Security

• Production API key stored in secret manager (not env file)
• Different API keys for dev/staging/production
• .env files in .gitignore
• Git history scanned for accidentally committed keys
• API key has minimal scopes needed

Code Quality

• All tests passing (unit + integration)
• No hardcoded API keys or URLs
• Error handling covers all Exa HTTP codes (400, 401, 402, 403, 429, 5xx)
• requestId captured from error responses
• Rate limiting/exponential backoff implemented