---

How it works

The four-verb memory API (remember / recall / improve / forget) remember ingests and builds the graph; recall auto-routes retrieval over it.

---

Quick Start

The fastest way in is the cognee-cli binary and its memory API: remember what you know, recall when you need it, improve the graph from feedback, forget what's stale.

Prerequisites

• Rust toolchain — install rustup; the repo's pinned toolchain (Rust 1.91, declared in rust-toolchain.toml) is selected automatically. The workspace is edition 2024 / resolver 3; MSRV is 1.91.
• An LLM API key (OpenAI-compatible).

Build the CLI from source with Cargo.

Build

cargo build --release   # -> target/release/cognee-cli

The default feature set wires the fully embedded, no-external-service stack: SQLite (relational), Ladybug (graph), and Lancedb.

# put it on your PATH for the snippets below
export PATH="$PWD/target/release:$PATH"

Configure the LLM

A .env file in the working directory is auto-loaded. The only required setting is the LLM API key:

export LLM_API_KEY="sk-..."        # canonical name (OPENAI_TOKEN is an accepted alias)
# optional overrides:
export LLM_MODEL="openai/gpt-5-mini"     # the compiled default is openai/gpt-5-mini
export LLM_ENDPOINT="https://..."  # alias: OPENAI_URL; empty -> OpenAI's API

To run embeddings fully localy, set EMBEDDING_PROVIDER=onnx (or ollama).

Fully local with Ollama (LLM via Ollama, embeddings local):

ollama serve &
ollama pull llama3.2:3b

export OPENAI_URL=http://localhost:11434/v1
export OPENAI_TOKEN=not-needed      # dummy value still required — the LLM client checks for a non-empty key
export OPENAI_MODEL=llama3.2:3b
export EMBEDDING_PROVIDER=ollama    # or onnx — otherwise embeddings still call OpenAI

Your first memory

# store, then ask — this is the whole loop
cognee-cli remember "Cognee turns raw data into a queryable knowledge graph."
cognee-cli recall   "what does cognee do?"

remember ingests, builds the knowledge graph, and runs a self-improvement pass (disable with --no-improve). recall auto-routes the search type for you when --query-type is omitted.

Session memory — scope facts to a transient conversation cache instead of the permanent graph:

cognee-cli remember "we ship Friday" --session-id chat-42
cognee-cli recall   "when do we ship?" --session-id chat-42

Forget — clean up (exactly one target is required):

cognee-cli forget --all              # everything you own
cognee-cli forget -d main_dataset    # one whole dataset
cognee-cli forget --data-id <uuid> --dataset-name main_dataset   # one item

Improve — nudge the graph from feedback:

cognee-cli improve -d main_dataset --node-name "Cognee" --feedback-alpha 0.1

Memory API at a glance

Command	Purpose	Shared flags
remember <data…>	add + cognify (+ improve)	-d/--dataset-name, --session-id, --no-improve, --tenant-id
recall <query>	smart search (auto-routes)	-d/--datasets, -t/--query-type, -k/--top-k (10), --session-id, -f/--output-format
improve	reinforce graph from feedback	-d/--dataset-name, --session-id, --node-name, --feedback-alpha (0.1), --tenant-id
forget	delete memory	one of --all / -d / --data-id+--dataset-name, --tenant-id

Flags are not uniform across subcommands: only recall/search accept -t/--query-type, -k/--top-k, and -f/--output-format; forget has no -k or --session-id. Mixing them across subcommands fails clap parsing.

CLI config is also persisted at ~/.config/cognee-rust/config.json (via cognee-cli config set). Precedence is defaults < JSON config < env vars — explicit env vars always win, but a stale config.json can override .env-implied defaults.

Using it from Rust

The library crates are published on crates.io. Depend on the top-level cognee-lib crate:

cargo add cognee-lib          # or add `cognee-lib = "0.1"` under [dependencies]

For local development against the in-repo sources, point the dependency at a path instead: cognee-lib = { path = "crates/lib" }.

There is a high-level one-call API — cognee_lib::prelude::remember() / recall() / forget() / improve() — that mirrors the Python functions. Be aware: these are not self-contained. Each takes a set of pre-built components (pipelines, LLM, storage, graph DB, vector DB, embedding engine, session manager, …) — as Arc<dyn …> handles (remember/improve) or borrowed references to already-wired orchestrators (recall/forget), so you must wire the component graph first. They are "one call" only after the wiring.

The lowest-friction wiring root is ComponentManager, which lazily builds the engines from env/Settings:

use cognee_lib::ComponentManager;
use cognee_lib::config::ConfigManager;

let cm = ComponentManager::new(ConfigManager::from_env());
let storage   = cm.storage().await?;
let database  = cm.database().await?;
let graph_db  = cm.graph_db().await?;
let vector_db = cm.vector_db().await?;
let embedding = cm.embedding_engine().await?;
let llm       = cm.llm().await?;

From there you build an AddPipeline and a SearchOrchestrator (via SearchBuilder) and call add(...) / cognify(...) / orch.search(&SearchRequest{..}). See examples/add_example.rs, examples/cognify_example.rs, and crates/bindings-common/src/services.rs (CogneeServices::build) for the canonical wiring.

Language Bindings

The convenient Cognee class — new(settings) → warm() → remember() / recall() (or the lower-level add() / cognify() / search()) — is exposed by the bindings, not the raw Rust crate. warm() resolves owner_id and builds + caches the component graph once, giving you the wiring-free experience the pure-Rust path lacks. All four bindings share the same SDK-tier implementation via crates/bindings-common/, so their surfaces line up 1:1.

Binding	Install	README	Primary API
JavaScript/TypeScript (Neon)	npm install @cognee/cognee-ts (npm)	ts/README.md	import { Cognee } from '@cognee/cognee-ts'
Python (PyO3)	build from source (maturin develop) — not yet on PyPI	python/README.md	from cognee_py import Cognee
C API (FFI)	build from source — see README	capi/README.md	#include "cognee_sdk.h" + cg_sdk_*
Java (JNI)	io.github.topoteretes:cognee (Maven Central)	java/README.md	import ai.cognee.Cognee;

Objectives

• Small-model support: run with on-device models (Phi4 class + embeddings).
• 90+ correctness: keep the basic cognee ability to reach similar correctness to the Python Cognee SDK (90+%).
• On-device vs Cloud ability: transformation tasks + orchestration design support on-device and cloud mode.
• Multimodal support: the implementation supports multimodal data ingestion.
• Retrieval: optimally 0.6 sec on a reasonably sized knowledge base.

Orchestration requirements

• Memory Control: control over the memory used by the ingestion pipeline.
• CPU control: control over threads and parallelization in the ingestion pipeline.
• Autonomous task scheduling: dynamic scheduling of memory-tasks.

Graph Backend Concurrency

For file-backed graph storage, Python's reference implementation documents a default single-owning-process model for SQLite/Ladybug/LanceDB access, while also supporting an opt-in Redis-backed shared Ladybug lock for multi-process coordination. Rust currently matches that default model: Ladybug writes are idempotent and serialized in-process, but cross-process locking is intentionally out of scope.

Running Tests

cargo test --workspace

For local full-suite execution (including LLM and ONNX/tokenizer dependent tests), use:

# Run the whole workspace (downloads embedding models if missing,
# single-threaded for LLM isolation):
bash scripts/run_tests_with_openai.sh

# Or a single test by name:
bash scripts/run_tests_with_openai.sh test_fact_extraction

Reclaiming disk space

The bindings live in their own Cargo workspaces, so a root cargo clean leaves their target/ dirs (tens of GB) behind. Clean all of them at once:

bash scripts/clean_all.sh                   # cargo clean every workspace
bash scripts/clean_all.sh --dry-run --all   # report sizes, delete nothing
bash scripts/clean_all.sh --help            # flags and what each one removes

See CONTRIBUTING.md § Cleaning build artifacts for what is kept back (downloaded models, the iOS xcframework) and why.

Observability

Cognee emits OpenTelemetry traces from every pipeline stage. To export them to an OTLP collector:

cargo build --release --features telemetry
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://otlp.your-collector:4317 \
  cognee-cli search --query "what did we ingest yesterday?"

See docs/observability/opentelemetry.md for the full guide (env vars, recipes for Grafana Tempo, Honeycomb, Dash0, and in-cluster Collectors).

Logging

Cognee writes structured logs to stdout and (when a writable directory is available) to a rotating file, owned by the cognee-logging crate (cognee_logging::init_logging, called by the CLI and HTTP server). The full env-var table (COGNEE_LOG_*, RUST_LOG/LOG_LEVEL, LOG_FILE_NAME) is documented in Configuration → Logging.