Install and run cognee

Install

Requires Python 3.10–3.14. Prefer uv:

bash
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):

bash
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:

python
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.

Session memory is the other half of the API — remember(..., session_id="chat_1") writes to a fast session cache rather than running add+cognify inline, and recall(..., session_id="chat_1") reads it back (session hits short-circuit the graph search). With the default self_improvement=True it still bridges that data into the permanent graph in the background; improve(dataset=..., session_ids=[...]) does the same explicitly. Session memory runs on the session cache, which is on by default (CACHING=true); setting CACHING=false disables it entirely and makes remember(session_id=...) raise.

Start with examples/advanced_guides/remember_recall_improve_example.py, which walks through permanent memory, session memory, and the sync between them.

The add() / cognify() / search() / memify() primitives still exist and are what remember/recall/improve call underneath — reach for them when you need to drive a stage in isolation (e.g. custom pipeline tasks), not for ordinary ingestion. cognee.delete is formally deprecated (since 0.3.9); forget() is the v1 replacement, unifying the old delete/prune/empty_dataset paths behind one call. When to use recall() versus the low-level search() is covered in docs/recall-vs-search.md.

Verify / troubleshoot

• cognee-cli remember "hello" && cognee-cli recall "hello" exercises the same

flow from the shell.

• To wipe local state during experiments: cognee-cli forget --all (or

await cognee.forget(everything=True)).

• Reads slow or spending tokens on every query → set AUTO_FEEDBACK=false

(keep CACHING=true); by default cognee makes one structured-output LLM call per answered query to self-tune its memory.

• Structured LLM output errors usually mean the model/provider needs an

explicit instructor mode: LLM_INSTRUCTOR_MODE="json_schema_mode".