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
Content moderation enabled (
```
moderation: true
```
) for user-facing search

Performance

Search type appropriate for latency SLO (
```
fast
```
/
```
auto
```
/
```
neural
```
)
```
numResults
```
minimized per use case (3-5 for most)
```
maxCharacters
```
set on text and highlights
Result caching enabled (LRU or Redis)
Request queue with concurrency limit (respect 10 QPS default)

Monitoring

Search latency histogram instrumented
Error rate counter by status code
Cache hit/miss rate tracked
Daily search volume tracked (for budget)
Alerts configured for latency > 3s, error rate > 5%

Deploy Procedure

Step 1: Pre-Flight Verification

set -euo pipefail
echo "=== Exa Pre-Flight ==="

# 1. Verify production API key works
HTTP_CODE=$(curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" \
  -X POST https://api.exa.ai/search \
  -H "x-api-key: $EXA_API_KEY_PROD" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query":"pre-flight check","numResults":1}')
echo "API Status: $HTTP_CODE"
[ "$HTTP_CODE" = "200" ] || { echo "FAIL: API key invalid"; exit 1; }

# 2. Verify tests pass
npm test || { echo "FAIL: Tests failing"; exit 1; }

echo "Pre-flight PASSED"

Step 2: Health Check Endpoint

import Exa from "exa-js";

const exa = new Exa(process.env.EXA_API_KEY);

app.get("/health/exa", async (_req, res) => {
  const start = performance.now();
  try {
    const result = await exa.search("health check", { numResults: 1 });
    const latencyMs = Math.round(performance.now() - start);
    res.json({
      status: "healthy",
      latencyMs,
      resultCount: result.results.length,
      timestamp: new Date().toISOString(),
    });
  } catch (err: any) {
    res.status(503).json({
      status: "unhealthy",
      error: err.message,
      errorCode: err.status,
      latencyMs: Math.round(performance.now() - start),
    });
  }
});

Step 3: Gradual Rollout

set -euo pipefail
# Deploy canary (10% traffic)
kubectl apply -f k8s/production.yaml
kubectl rollout pause deployment/exa-service

echo "Canary deployed. Monitor for 10 minutes..."
echo "Check: /health/exa endpoint, error rates, latency"

# After monitoring, resume to full rollout
# kubectl rollout resume deployment/exa-service

Post-Deployment Verification

set -euo pipefail
# Verify production endpoint
curl -sf https://your-app.com/health/exa | python3 -m json.tool

# Check error rates (if Prometheus available)
curl -s "localhost:9090/api/v1/query?query=rate(exa_search_error[5m])" 2>/dev/null

Rollback Procedure

set -euo pipefail
# Immediate rollback
kubectl rollout undo deployment/exa-service
kubectl rollout status deployment/exa-service
echo "Rollback complete. Verify /health/exa endpoint."

Alert Thresholds

Alert	Condition	Severity
API Down	5xx errors > 10/min	P1
Auth Failure	401/403 errors > 0	P1
Rate Limited	429 errors > 5/min	P2
High Latency	P95 > 5000ms	P2
Budget Warning	Daily searches > 80% of limit	P3

Error Handling

Issue	Cause	Solution
Health check fails	API key not set in prod	Verify secret injection
Latency spike after deploy	Missing cache warm-up	Pre-populate cache
Rate limit on launch	Traffic spike	Enable request queue
Rollback needed	Error rate spike	`kubectl rollout undo`

Resources

Next Steps

For version upgrades, see

exa-upgrade-migration

. For incident response, see

exa-incident-runbook

Claude-code-plugins-plus-skills exa-prod-checklist