Exa Multi-environment Isolation

Overview

Separate Exa development, staging, and production credentials, budgets, schedules, data, and observability. Treat credentials, queries, retrieved content, generated output, spend, and destructive state as separately governed boundaries.

Prerequisites

• The target repository, environment, Exa team, product surface, and accountable owner.
• The workload's data classification, latency and freshness promise, cost ceiling, and retention policy.
• Current first-party documentation plus credentials only for a narrowly approved live check.

Current Contract

Exa usage and paid access are organized through teams, and team members share plan features and limits. API keys can have names, rate limits, and budgets when Team Management is enabled. Environment isolation must be designed rather than inferred from a key name.

Authentication

For normal REST work, inject EXA_API_KEY from an approved server-side secret manager and send it only as Authorization: Bearer to the configured first-party Exa API host. Team Management service keys, hosted MCP OAuth or enterprise managed authorization, and payment-protocol calls are separate trust models. Never print, commit, place in a URL, or expose a credential to an untrusted client.