Exa SDK and API Upgrade Migration

Overview

Upgrade Exa SDK or API usage through a contract inventory, fixture diff, canary, and reversible dependency change. 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

Current Search uses auto, fast, instant, deep-lite, deep, and deep-reasoning; neural is legacy terminology for new code. SDK method names and request casing differ by language, and newer product surfaces may be beta-gated. The first-party SDK specifications and changelog are the migration authority.

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.