PerplexityapiPerplexity CLI
A command-line tool that lets coding agents run Perplexity web searches and pull page text from the terminal.
Details
- Two commands: pplx search web runs a search, and pplx content fetch pulls the text of a page
- Both return JSON, so an agent or script can parse the output directly instead of reading prose
- Installs to ~/.local/bin/pplx on macOS and Linux through a shell script that verifies checksums and needs no admin privileges
- Requires a Perplexity API key, set through pplx auth login or a PERPLEXITY_API_KEY environment variable
- Perplexity ships it as an agent skill file on GitHub, so you can point an agent at the file and have it install the tool itself
Best for
Giving a coding agent live web access so it can look up current docs or news instead of working from what it was trained on.
When to use it
Your agent needs information newer than its training cutoff, or you want search results back as structured data a script can parse.
Who benefits
Developers running terminal agents like Claude Code or Codex.
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