Start the cognee server locally

From an installed cognee (no Docker)

cognee-cli -ui

launches the full local stack: FastAPI backend on http://localhost:8000 and the UI on http://localhost:3000. Needs LLM_API_KEY in the environment or .env. The interactive API reference is at http://localhost:8000/docs, health at /health.

For API-only serving via Docker instead, use the cognee-docker skill (the prebuilt cognee/cognee:main image or docker compose up from the repo).

Auth posture

ENABLE_BACKEND_ACCESS_CONTROL decides everything:

• true (default): multi-tenant, auth required on every API call, per user+dataset database isolation.
• false: single-user local mode, no auth, shared local databases. Right choice for a personal dev server; never for anything exposed.

REQUIRE_AUTHENTICATION=false is ignored while access control is on; to turn auth off you must set ENABLE_BACKEND_ACCESS_CONTROL=false.

Behind a TLS-terminating proxy set AUTH_TOKEN_COOKIE_SECURE=true so the auth cookie gets the Secure attribute; leave it off for plain http://localhost, where a browser refuses to store a Secure cookie.

Connecting clients to the running server

• SDK / CLI against the server (instead of embedded local mode):

  cognee-cli serve --url http://localhost:8000        # local instance
  cognee-cli serve --url https://... --api-key ck_... # cognee cloud instance
  cognee-cli serve                                    # reconnect to the saved keyed instance
  cognee-cli serve --logout                           # disconnect
  

  In Python: await cognee.serve(url="http://localhost:8000").