Web Search with Tavily | NVIDIA NeMo Helix

The Tavily plugin gives agents tavily_search and tavily_extract tools. It is a third-party plugin maintained by Tavily. The platform proxies agent requests to Tavily’s hosted MCP server with the workspace’s Tavily API key, so agents never see the key.

Once a workspace has a Tavily key, search queries and page URLs from agents with Tavily enabled and from nemo tavily search and nemo tavily extract go to mcp.tavily.com under Tavily’s terms. See Third-Party Services.

Where it is included

Environment	Plugin installed	Proxy on by default
Helm chart and NeMo Helix images	Yes	Yes
Source checkout (`make bootstrap`)	Yes	No. Run the `tavily` service with `NEMO_TAVILY_ENABLED=true`.
`pip install nemo-helix`	No	No

The plugin is published on PyPI as nemo-helix-tavily-plugin. To install it where it isn’t included, including in a custom image, follow its README. It requires NeMo Helix 0.9 or later.

Turn the proxy on or off

The platform reads this setting at startup, so restart it after a change. An environment variable takes precedence over the config file.

Where	Disable
Helm	`platformConfig.tavily.enabled: false`
Environment	`NEMO_TAVILY_ENABLED=false`
Platform config file	`tavily: {enabled: false}`

When the proxy is off, the plugin mounts no routes and never contacts Tavily.

Use Tavily

Store a key with nemo tavily setup, then enable Tavily on an agent with nemo tavily enable <agent>. The README covers these steps, the other nemo tavily commands, settings such as the allowed tools, and troubleshooting.