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Connect Slack to Cognee so your team can query and grow the knowledge graph without leaving a channel or DM. Once a workspace is connected, anyone in it can run /cognee-ask to search memory, save a message to memory with the Remember this shortcut, and review answers before sharing them with the rest of the channel.
This integration is for self-hosted Cognee deployments — you create and own the Slack app, so it lives entirely inside your own Slack workspace and your own Cognee backend. There is no shared, Cognee-managed Slack app.

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Why Use This Integration

  • Ask from anywhere in Slack: /cognee-ask <question> searches your memory and replies privately, with a Share button to post the question + answer to the channel once you’ve checked it.
  • Save context on the fly: the Remember this message shortcut stores any Slack message into Cognee memory, tagged with the channel and author.
  • Per-user, not per-workspace: each Slack member links their own Cognee account (/cognee-link <api_key>), so answers and saved memories respect the same permissions they’d have via the API or SDK.
  • Self-hosted, no middleman: your Slack app talks directly to your Cognee backend. No data passes through a third-party relay.

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Prerequisites

  • A running Cognee backend reachable over HTTPS from the public internet (Slack will not call localhost). For local development, use a tunnel like ngrok; for production, this is your deployment’s normal public domain.
  • A Cognee account with an API key for each Slack member who wants to link their account.

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Setup

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1. Create the Slack App

  1. Go to api.slack.com/apps → Create New App → From scratch.
  2. Name it (e.g. “Cognee”) and pick the workspace you’re installing it into for development.
Everything below is configured on this app’s page.

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2. Bot Token Scopes

OAuth & Permissions → Scopes → Bot Token Scopes — add:
Deliberately no channels:history — bulk channel ingestion isn’t part of this integration (see external data sources for pulling Slack history via dlt instead). Slack’s non-Marketplace rate limits on history reads (1 request/minute as of 2025) make it impractical here anyway.

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3. OAuth Redirect URL

OAuth & Permissions → Redirect URLs — add exactly:
This must byte-match what your backend sends, which comes from SLACK_REDIRECT_URI in step 6 — copy the same value into both places.

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4. Slash Commands

Slash Commands → Create New Command — add both:

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5. Event Subscriptions & App Home

  1. Event Subscriptions → toggle on → Request URL: https://<your-backend-domain>/api/v1/slack/events
  2. Under Subscribe to bot events, add app_home_opened.
  3. App Home → enable the Home Tab.

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6. Interactivity & Shortcuts

  1. Interactivity & Shortcuts → toggle on → Request URL: https://<your-backend-domain>/api/v1/slack/interactive
  2. Under Shortcuts → Create New Shortcut → On messages:
    • Name: Remember this
    • Callback ID: remember_this (must match exactly — this is how Cognee’s handler recognizes it)

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7. Configure Cognee

Copy the app’s credentials into your backend’s .env (Basic Information for the first three):
Restart the backend so it picks up the new values.

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8. Install and Connect

  1. Install App (in the Slack app’s sidebar) to add it to your workspace.
  2. In the Cognee UI, go to Integrations and click Connect Slack — this runs the OAuth install and links the workspace to your Cognee account.
  3. In Slack, run /cognee-link <api_key> (from your Cognee account’s API Keys settings) so your own messages resolve to your own Cognee user.
  4. Try /cognee-ask What does Cognee do? — you should get a private reply with a Share button.

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Multiple Environments

Slack apps are tied to one set of OAuth credentials and one Redirect URL each. If you run more than one Cognee deployment (local dev, staging, production), create a separate Slack app per environment rather than editing one app’s config back and forth — each environment gets its own SLACK_CLIENT_ID/SLACK_CLIENT_SECRET/SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET/SLACK_REDIRECT_URI. This avoids local testing ever breaking a shared staging or production connection. For local development with a tunnel, a reserved/static ngrok domain means you only register the Redirect URL once — it keeps working across every ngrok http restart instead of changing each time.
This is separate from how many Slack workspaces one deployment can serve: any number of different teams can each connect their own workspace to the same Cognee deployment through the same “Connect Slack” OAuth flow — that’s already multi-tenant by design and needs no extra setup per workspace.

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Troubleshooting

  1. “redirect_uri did not match any configured URIs” (shown by Slack, during Connect Slack): the redirect_uri your backend sent (from SLACK_REDIRECT_URI) isn’t byte-identical to an entry under OAuth & Permissions → Redirect URLs. Slack enforces an exact match as a security measure — add the missing URL there, or fix SLACK_REDIRECT_URI to match one already registered.
  2. Slash commands/events return 401: SLACK_SIGNING_SECRET in .env doesn’t match the app’s Basic Information → App Credentials value, so Cognee’s X-Slack-Signature check rejects the request. Recheck the value and restart the backend.
  3. Slack shows “dispatch_failed” instead of a reply: the Slash Command’s Request URL is missing or wrong — it must point at /api/v1/slack/commands, not /api/v1/slack/events or /api/v1/slack/interactive. If the URL is correct but you see Command `/some-command` is not yet supported. instead, that command was registered in the Slack App but isn’t one of the two Cognee implements (/cognee-ask, /cognee-link).
  4. “This Slack workspace is not connected to Cognee”: the OAuth install (Connect Slack in the Cognee UI) hasn’t completed for this workspace yet, or the connection was later disconnected/revoked.

External Data Sources

Pull Slack channel history in bulk via dlt, instead of the live bot.

Cloud Integrations UI

Where “Connect Slack” lives in the Cognee UI.