Install and run cognee

Install

Requires Python 3.10, 3.14. Prefer uv:

uv venv && source .venv/bin/activate
uv pip install cognee            # from PyPI
# or, working inside this repo:
uv pip install -e .

Add extras only when needed, examples: cognee[postgres], cognee[neo4j], cognee[docling] (office/HTML document parsing, slim), cognee[docs] (unstructured), cognee[anthropic], cognee[ollama], cognee[aws]. The full list is in pyproject.toml under [project.optional-dependencies].

Configure

The only required setting is an LLM API key. Create .env in the working directory (or export the variable):

LLM_API_KEY="your_openai_api_key"

Defaults need no services: SQLite (relational), LanceDB (vector), and Ladybug (graph), all stored locally. OpenAI is the default LLM and embedding provider, if you configure a different LLM but not embeddings (or vice versa), the other silently stays on OpenAI. For other providers and databases use the cognee-integrations skill.

First run

As of cognee 1.x the memory API, remember, recall, forget, improve, is the primary surface. All SDK functions are async. Minimal end-to-end script:

import asyncio
import cognee


async def main():
    await cognee.remember("Cognee turns documents into AI memory.")
    results = await cognee.recall("What does cognee do?")
    print(results)


asyncio.run(main())

remember() is the whole ingestion path in one call, it runs add() + cognify(), then improve() to index the graph (self_improvement=True by default). It accepts text, file paths, URLs, and binary streams, with an optional dataset_name="my_project"; pass datasets=["my_project"] to recall() to stay inside one dataset.

recall() auto-routes the query to a search strategy by default. Pass query_type=SearchType.CHUNKS (etc.) to pin one, or auto_route=False to fall back to GRAPH_COMPLETION.