QUICKSTART

This guide will help you get started with Cognee quickly and efficiently. Follow these step-by-step instructions to set up your environment, install Cognee, and run your first knowledge graph operations.

1. Preparation

Cognee runs on Python versions 3.9 to 3.12, make sure you have a suitable setup.

Before running Cognee you have to specify up your environment. This is easiest done editing the .env file in the directory you are working in.

Cognee relies on third-party LLM providers and you have a great choice of them you can use in your workflow.

The simple way

Just provide your OpenAI API key if you already have one. This will help you both with LLM and embeddings.

echo 'LLM_API_KEY="your_api_key"' > .env

The free way

If you don’t have an OpenAI API key and you would like to try Cognee with free services, register for an OpenRouter  account and get a free API key. OpenRouter does not host embedding providers, so you have to fall back to a local way to do that. Your .env should look something like this then:

LLM_API_KEY="your_api_key"
LLM_PROVIDER="custom"
LLM_MODEL="openrouter/google/gemini-2.0-flash-thinking-exp-1219:free"
LLM_ENDPOINT="https://openrouter.ai/api/v1"
EMBEDDING_PROVIDER="fastembed"
EMBEDDING_MODE="sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2"
EMBEDDING_DIMENSIONS=384
EMBEDDING_MAX_TOKENS=256

2. Install cognee

In this example we will use Poetry to install Cognee. You can also install it with pip or uv.

poetry init
poetry add cognee
# poetry add fastembed ## if you are going the free way

Cognee stores data in a relational database, in a vector database and in a graph database. We provide you with a variety of possibilities for each store, so you can choose the right one for your purposes. To see more check out our infrastructure) page.

For this simple example we will use our default set of SQLite, LanceDB and NetworkX that doesn’t require extra servers or registration at third parties.

3. Basic usage

This minimal example shows how to add content, process it, and perform a search:

import cognee
import asyncio
 
async def main():
    
    # Add sample content
    text = "Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science."
    await cognee.add(text)
    
    # Process with LLMs to build the knowledge graph
    await cognee.cognify()
    
    # Search the knowledge graph
    results = await cognee.search(
        query_text="Tell me about NLP"
    )
    
    for result in results:
        print(result)
 
if __name__ == '__main__':
    asyncio.run(main())

4. Further resources

• If you want to try cognee in an interactive notebook environment check out our Cognee GraphRAG Simple Example Colab 
• You can also try our Dockerized server via using the API. 

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