Quickstart
Go from zero to your first graph + vector query in under five minutes.
1. Create an account
Sign up at veculo.com/signup. You will receive a confirmation email — click the link to activate your account, then sign in to the dashboard.
2. Create a cluster
From the dashboard, click Create Cluster. Choose a name, a region, and a size measured in Veculo Units (VUs). For development, the Starter tier (2 VUs) is a good starting point.
Provisioning takes about 90 seconds. Your cluster is ready when its status changes to RUNNING.
Cluster ID
cls_abc123. You will use this in every API call.3. Get an API key
Navigate to Settings → API Keys in the dashboard and generate a new key. Keys are prefixed with vk_live_ for production or vk_test_ for test environments.
Keep it secret
4. Set your environment variables
All examples on this page use these two variables. Set them once in your shell:
export VECULO_CLUSTER_ID="cls_abc123" export VECULO_API_KEY="vk_live_abc123def456"
5. Insert your first vertex
A vertex is a node in your graph. It has an ID, a label, and a map of properties. Optionally, you can attach a visibility expression to control who can read it.
curl -X POST "https://api.veculo.com/v1/$VECULO_CLUSTER_ID/vertices" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $VECULO_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"id": "doc:arxiv-2401.001",
"label": "document",
"properties": {
"title": "Attention Is All You Need",
"authors": "Vaswani et al.",
"year": 2017,
"field": "machine-learning"
},
"visibility": "public"
}'Response:
{
"id": "doc:arxiv-2401.001",
"label": "document",
"properties": {
"title": "Attention Is All You Need",
"authors": "Vaswani et al.",
"year": 2017,
"field": "machine-learning"
},
"visibility": "public",
"created_at": "2026-03-21T14:30:00Z"
}6. Query your vertex
Retrieve a vertex by its ID:
curl "https://api.veculo.com/v1/$VECULO_CLUSTER_ID/vertices/doc:arxiv-2401.001" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $VECULO_API_KEY"
{
"id": "doc:arxiv-2401.001",
"label": "document",
"properties": {
"title": "Attention Is All You Need",
"authors": "Vaswani et al.",
"year": 2017,
"field": "machine-learning"
},
"visibility": "public",
"created_at": "2026-03-21T14:30:00Z"
}7. Add edges
Edges connect two vertices. They have a type (label), optional properties, and their own visibility expression.
First, add a second vertex:
curl -X POST "https://api.veculo.com/v1/$VECULO_CLUSTER_ID/vertices" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $VECULO_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"id": "doc:arxiv-2312.044",
"label": "document",
"properties": {
"title": "Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks",
"authors": "Lewis et al.",
"year": 2020,
"field": "nlp"
},
"visibility": "public"
}'Now connect them with a "cites" edge:
curl -X POST "https://api.veculo.com/v1/$VECULO_CLUSTER_ID/edges" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $VECULO_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"source": "doc:arxiv-2312.044",
"target": "doc:arxiv-2401.001",
"edge_type": "cites",
"properties": {
"section": "related-work",
"context": "foundational transformer architecture"
},
"visibility": "public"
}'{
"source": "doc:arxiv-2312.044",
"target": "doc:arxiv-2401.001",
"edge_type": "cites",
"properties": {
"section": "related-work",
"context": "foundational transformer architecture"
},
"visibility": "public",
"created_at": "2026-03-21T14:31:00Z"
}8. Run a vector similarity search
Add a vertex with a vector embedding, then search for similar items. This is the foundation of RAG pipelines.
curl -X POST "https://api.veculo.com/v1/$VECULO_CLUSTER_ID/vertices/embedding" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $VECULO_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"id": "doc:arxiv-2401.001",
"label": "document",
"properties": {
"title": "Attention Is All You Need",
"authors": "Vaswani et al."
},
"embedding": [0.023, -0.114, 0.891, 0.445, -0.067, 0.234, 0.556, -0.321],
"visibility": "public"
}'Now search for vertices with embeddings similar to a query vector. You can also traverse the graph from each result by specifying edge_type and depth:
curl -X POST "https://api.veculo.com/v1/$VECULO_CLUSTER_ID/query/vector" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $VECULO_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"embedding": [0.019, -0.108, 0.875, 0.439, -0.071, 0.228, 0.561, -0.318],
"top_k": 5,
"edge_type": "cites",
"depth": 2
}'{
"results": [
{
"vertex": {
"id": "doc:arxiv-2401.001",
"label": "document",
"properties": {
"title": "Attention Is All You Need",
"authors": "Vaswani et al."
}
},
"score": 0.9847,
"neighbors": [
{
"vertex": {
"id": "doc:arxiv-2312.044",
"label": "document",
"properties": {
"title": "Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks",
"authors": "Lewis et al."
}
},
"edge_type": "cites",
"depth": 1
}
]
}
],
"query_time_ms": 12
}Hybrid queries
Next steps
- Read Core Concepts to understand the data model in depth
- Explore the full API Reference
- Learn about cell-level security and visibility expressions
- Follow the RAG pipeline guide to build a production retrieval system