jina-cli

MCP version

All Jina AI APIs as Unix commands. Search, read, embed, rerank - with pipes.

This CLI is designed for both humans and AI agents. An agent with shell access needs only run(command="jina search ...") instead of managing 20 separate tool definitions. The CLI supports pipes, chaining (&&, ||, ;), and --help for self-discovery.

Install

pip install jina-cli
# or
uv pip install jina-cli

Set your API key:

export JINA_API_KEY=your-key-here
# Get one at https://jina.ai/?sui=apikey

Commands

Command	Description
jina read URL	Extract clean markdown from web pages
jina search QUERY	Web search (also --arxiv, --ssrn, --images, --blog)
jina embed TEXT	Generate embeddings
jina rerank QUERY	Rerank documents from stdin by relevance
jina classify TEXT	Classify text into labels
jina dedup	Deduplicate text from stdin
jina screenshot URL	Capture screenshot of a URL
jina bibtex QUERY	Search BibTeX citations (DBLP + Semantic Scholar)
jina expand QUERY	Expand a query into related queries
jina pdf URL	Extract figures/tables/equations from PDFs
jina datetime URL	Guess publish/update date of a URL
jina primer	Context info (time, location, network)
jina grep PATTERN	Semantic grep (requires pip install jina-grep)

Pipes

The point of a CLI is composability. Every command reads from stdin and writes to stdout.

# Search and rerank
jina search "transformer models" | jina rerank "efficient inference"
Read multiple URLs
cat urls.txt | jina read
Search, deduplicate results
jina search "attention mechanism" | jina dedup
Chain searches
jina expand "climate change" | head -1 | xargs -I {} jina search "{}"
Get BibTeX for arXiv results
jina search --arxiv "BERT" --json | jq -r '.results[].title' | head -3

Usage

Read web pages

jina read https://example.com
jina read https://example.com --links --images
echo "https://example.com" | jina read

Search

jina search "what is BERT"
jina search --arxiv "attention mechanism" -n 10
jina search --ssrn "corporate governance"
jina search --images "neural network diagram"
jina search --blog "embeddings"
jina search "AI news" --time d          # past day
jina search "LLMs" --gl us --hl en     # US, English

Embed

jina embed "hello world"
jina embed "text1" "text2" "text3"
cat texts.txt | jina embed
jina embed "hello" --model jina-embeddings-v5-text-small --task retrieval.query

Rerank

cat docs.txt | jina rerank "machine learning"
jina search "AI" | jina rerank "embeddings" --top-n 5

Classify

jina classify "I love this product" --labels positive,negative,neutral
echo "stock prices rose sharply" | jina classify --labels business,sports,tech
cat texts.txt | jina classify --labels cat1,cat2,cat3 --json

Deduplicate

cat items.txt | jina dedup
cat items.txt | jina dedup -k 10

Screenshot

jina screenshot https://example.com                        # prints screenshot URL
jina screenshot https://example.com -o page.png            # saves to file
jina screenshot https://example.com --full-page -o page.jpg

BibTeX

jina bibtex "attention is all you need"
jina bibtex "transformer" --author Vaswani --year 2017

PDF extraction

jina pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.12345
jina pdf 2301.12345                        # arXiv ID shorthand
jina pdf https://example.com/paper.pdf --type figure,table

JSON output

Every command supports --json for structured output, useful for piping to jq:

jina search "BERT" --json | jq '.results[0].url'
jina read https://example.com --json | jq '.data.content'

Exit codes

Code	Meaning
0	Success
1	User/input error (missing args, bad input, missing API key)
2	API/server error (network, timeout, server error)
130	Interrupted (Ctrl+C)

Useful for scripting and agent workflows:

jina search "query" && echo "success" || echo "failed with $?"

Environment variables

Variable	Description
JINA_API_KEY	API key for Jina services (required for most commands)

For AI agents

An agent with shell access can use this CLI directly:

result = run(command="jina search 'transformer architecture'")
result = run(command="jina read https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.12345")
result = run(command="jina search 'AI' | jina rerank 'embeddings'")

No tool catalog needed. The agent discovers capabilities via jina --help and jina search --help. Errors include actionable guidance.

Semantic grep

jina grep provides semantic search over files using local Jina embeddings on MLX. It requires a separate install:

pip install jina-grep

jina grep "error handling" src/
jina grep -r --threshold 0.3 "database connection" .
grep -rn "error" src/ | jina grep "retry logic"

Supports most GNU grep flags (-r, -n, -l, -c, -A/-B/-C, --include, --exclude) plus semantic flags (--threshold, --top-k, --model). Run jina grep --help for full options.

Server mode

For repeated queries, start a persistent embedding server to avoid model reload:

jina grep serve start    # background server, model stays in GPU memory
jina grep serve stop     # stop when done

Local mode

jina embed, jina rerank, jina classify, and jina dedup support --local to run on Apple Silicon via the jina-grep embedding server instead of the Jina API. No API key needed.

# Start the local server first
jina grep serve start
Local embeddings
jina embed --local "hello world"
cat texts.txt | jina embed --local --json
Local reranking (cosine similarity on local embeddings)
cat docs.txt | jina rerank --local "machine learning"
Local classification (cosine similarity on local embeddings)
jina classify --local "this is great" --labels positive,negative
Local deduplication
cat items.txt | jina dedup --local

Local mode uses jina-embeddings-v5-nano by default. Override with --model jina-embeddings-v5-small.

Requires pip install jina-grep and jina grep serve start.

Design principles

Inspired by CLI is All Agents Need:

• One tool, not twenty. A single run(command="jina search ...") replaces a sprawling tool catalog. Less tool selection overhead, more problem solving.
• Unix pipes are the composition model. stdout is data, stderr is diagnostics. Commands chain with |, &&, ||. No SDK needed.
• Progressive --help for self-discovery. Layer 0: command list. Layer 1: usage + examples. Layer 2: full options. The agent fetches only what it needs, saving context budget.
• Error messages that course-correct. Every error says what went wrong and exactly how to fix it. One bad command should not cost more than one retry.
• stderr is the agent's most important channel. When a command fails, stderr carries the fix. Never discard it. Never mix it with data.
• Consistent output format. Same structure every time so the agent learns once, not every time. --json for structured, plain text for pipes.
• Meaningful exit codes. 0 success, 1 user error, 2 API error, 130 interrupted. Scripts and agents branch on these, not on parsing error strings.
• Layer 1 is raw Unix, Layer 2 is for LLM cognition. Pipe internals stay pure (no metadata, no truncation). Formatting and context only at the final output boundary.

License

Apache-2.0