Activation Reference — Unique AI Documentation

Activation Reference

4 min read

This page is the single place to look for the question "why is engine/reader X (not) showing up in the Spaces UI?" and "how do I turn the whole Web Search tool off?".

The key principle to internalise:

The env var puts the option in the UI; the API key in the env makes it actually work.

There are two independent gates:

  1. Visibility gate — ACTIVE_SEARCH_ENGINES and ACTIVE_INHOUSE_CRAWLERS (plus API-key auto-activation) decide which entries appear in the Search Engine and Web Page Reader dropdowns in the Spaces UI.

  2. Functional gate — for an engine or reader to actually run, its specific credentials (API key, Azure identity, GCP credentials, etc.) must also be configured. An engine can be visible but non-functional, in which case it appears in the dropdown but fails at runtime.

This page covers the visibility gate plus the platform-wide tool kill switch and the default-mode selector. For the functional gate (per-engine and per-reader credentials), see Search Engine Setup and Web Page Reader Setup.

Activation flow at startup

At runtime, the executor fetches credentials lazily and any engine or reader with missing credentials raises a configuration error before its first call.

Search Engine Activation

ACTIVE_SEARCH_ENGINES is a comma-separated list of engine identifiers. Each identifier appears in the engine selector if and only if it is on this list.

Identifier Display name in the UI Required env to make it functional Setup page
google Google Search GOOGLE_SEARCH_API_KEY, GOOGLE_SEARCH_API_ENDPOINT, GOOGLE_SEARCH_ENGINE_ID Search Engine Setup
bing Grounding with Bing Azure identity (AZURE_AI_PROJECT_ENDPOINT, optional AZURE_AI_ASSISTANT_ID, AZURE_AI_BING_RESOURCE_CONNECTION_STRING, AZURE_AI_BING_AGENT_MODEL) Search Engine Setup
vertexai Grounding with VertexAI GCP credentials (Workload Identity in production; VERTEXAI_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_CREDENTIALS for development) Search Engine Setup
brave Brave Search BRAVE_SEARCH_API_KEY, BRAVE_SEARCH_API_ENDPOINT Search Engine Setup
jina Jina Search JINA_API_KEY (JINA_SEARCH_API_ENDPOINT defaults if unset) Search Engine Setup
tavily Tavily Search TAVILY_API_KEY Search Engine Setup
firecrawl Firecrawl Search FIRECRAWL_API_KEY Search Engine Setup
custom_api Customized API Search CUSTOM_WEB_SEARCH_API_ENDPOINT and friends (or in-Space configuration) Search Engine Setup

Default:["google"].

Each Space can pick any one of the visible engines via its Search Engine setting.

Web Page Reader Activation

Reader activation has two layers:

  1. Built-in readers — ACTIVE_INHOUSE_CRAWLERS is the explicit list. Defaults to `[\