Alibaba Cloud Help Documentation Search and OpenAPI Verification

Search and read official Alibaba Cloud documentation on help.aliyun.com, and verify OpenAPI contracts against the public metadata of api.aliyun.com.

Capabilities

Full-text documentation search

Search help documents by keyword with relevance-ranked results, returning title, URL, and summary. An optional product filter narrows results to a single product such as OSS or ECS. Passing -p is strongly recommended: it makes the results far more precise (server-side product filtering plus a fused index leg), though it issues no fewer requests than the unscoped path and is only faster in degraded scenarios.

python3 scripts/aliyun_help.py search "cross-origin" -p oss

Read document content by URL

Fetch the full body of a document as clean Markdown by its URL (the .md suffix is appended automatically).

python3 scripts/aliyun_help.py read "https://help.aliyun.com/zh/ecs/user-guide/create-a-custom-image-from-a-snapshot-1"

Browse product documentation catalog

List all products, or list the full document catalog of one product (titles, links, and summaries grouped by category).

python3 scripts/aliyun_help.py list-products
python3 scripts/aliyun_help.py list-docs oss -n 50

OpenAPI metadata verification

Verify exact API contract details — parameter names, types, required flags, error codes, and RAM permission points — against structured metadata, which is more authoritative than narrative documentation.

python3 scripts/aliyun_help.py api-products actiontrail
python3 scripts/aliyun_help.py api-list actiontrail lookup
python3 scripts/aliyun_help.py api-info actiontrail LookupEvents

Execution rules

Help documentation is narrative and may lag behind the actual API behavior, while the OpenAPI metadata reflects the live contract; when the two disagree, the metadata is authoritative and the answer should note the source of each claim. Use documentation search and reading for "how to" and "why" questions, and metadata verification for "what are the exact parameters, error codes, or permission points" questions; combine both when background explanation is needed. When a search returns no results, suggest using WebSearch with the keyword plus site:help.aliyun.com (optionally scoped with /zh/{product_code}/) for broader coverage, and retrying with synonyms is also worth trying; additionally, empty results with -p should be rechecked via list-products (the product code may be wrong) and a retry without the product filter before concluding nothing exists. Every quoted document must be accompanied by its original URL so the user can open the source directly. All network calls in the scripts have explicit timeouts, so a slow or hung endpoint degrades gracefully instead of blocking.

For error codes and error messages, the preferred workflow is two-layered: first run a documentation search with the exact error code or the original error text, because the narrative troubleshooting documents explain the common causes, the impact, and the step-by-step remediation; only when a contract-level, exhaustive list of error codes for a specific API is required should the api-info metadata be consulted, since the metadata enumerates codes authoritatively but without remediation context.

When the question is about a new feature, a recent change, or changelog-like content, prefer results whose updated date (shown in both the JSON output and the rendered lines as (updated: YYYY-MM-DD)) is recent enough to cover the feature in question, and say so in the answer; index-leg entries legitimately carry no updated field, so an absent date is not by itself a sign of staleness, and when nothing looks fresh enough the claim should be flagged as possibly outdated.

Search keywords should be constructed following the methodology in references/query-construction.md — extract core entities and attributes, prefer documentation terminology over colloquial wording, split multi-intent questions into separate queries, and rely on the script's built-in alias expansion, error-code detection, and low-result expansion retry rather than ad-hoc paraphrasing.

ECS knowledge questions (instance types and instance families, billing modes, quotas and limits, best practices, API reference) follow the retrieval-first workflow in references/ecs-scenario-guide.md: construct terminology-based queries, degrade narrow → broad → rephrase when results are empty, answer with the retrieved details and source URLs, and never answer ECS facts from model memory without retrieval.

Inline invocation budget inside an agent: keep the default -n limit unless there is a concrete reason to raise it, and always pass -p when the product is known — the unscoped path scans hundreds of product indexes and takes 10–20 seconds, so it should be used sparingly and mainly as a retry when a product-scoped search comes back empty.

Helper script

The entry script is scripts/aliyun_help.py (Python 3 standard library only, no dependencies). Subcommands: list-products, list-docs, search, read, read-product, api-products, api-list, api-info, with -n result limits, -l line limits, and --json machine-readable output where applicable.

python3 scripts/aliyun_help.py search "snapshot" -p ecs -n 10

Observability

This skill performs only anonymous HTTPS GET requests to public endpoints and never invokes the aliyun CLI or any credentialed API. The helper script sends a fixed User-Agent header on every request (Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) QoderWork/1.0), and every backend degradation during search is logged as a WARN line on stderr so the fallback path is always traceable. Because no credentialed CLI or API calls are made, session-id correlation is not applicable to this skill.

Internal references

Implementation details are documented in the references directory: search backend architecture and degradation behavior in references/search-backend.md, help-center product codes in references/product-codes.md, OpenAPI metadata endpoints in references/api-metadata.md, the ECS documentation scenario workflow (retrieval-first query construction, degradation chain, and answer format) in references/ecs-scenario-guide.md, the unified query construction methodology (principles, good/weak examples, alias expansion, error-code guidance, and result-feedback rephrasing) in references/query-construction.md, the ECS knowledge FAQ (instance families, billing, quotas, best practices quick answers) in references/ecs-knowledge-faq.md, and the declaration that this skill requires no RAM permissions (zero-credential, anonymous read-only access) in references/ram-policies.md.