Configuration - Cognee Documentation

Settings resolve in three layers: compiled-in defaults, environment variables, and anything you pass to the Cognee constructor or change later through c.config. Constructor and c.config values win over the environment.

Constructor

const c = new Cognee(settings?)

settings is an optional object (or JSON string) that overrides env-derived defaults. Keys are the canonical Settings field names (llmModel, embeddingProvider, vectorDbProvider, etc.). Absent keys keep their env-variable or compiled-in default.

Config

Use c.config to change settings after construction. Granular setters are synchronous and take effect immediately (the engines are lazily rebuilt on the next pipeline call).

c.config.setLlmModel("gpt-5");
c.config.setLlmApiKey(process.env.OPENAI_TOKEN!);
c.config.setEmbeddingProvider("openai");
c.config.setEmbeddingModel("text-embedding-3-small");

// Bulk setters (throw on unknown key or type mismatch) — one per subsystem:
c.config.setLlmConfig({ model: "gpt-5", temperature: 0.2 });
c.config.setEmbeddingConfig({ provider: "openai", model: "text-embedding-3-small" });
c.config.setVectorDbConfig({ provider: "brute-force" });
c.config.setGraphDbConfig({ provider: "kuzu" });

// Generic key-value setter:
c.config.set("llmModel", "gpt-5-mini");

// Read back the current config (secret fields are redacted):
const cfg = c.config.get();
console.log(cfg);

Environment variables

Variable	Purpose
`OPENAI_URL`	LLM API base URL (OpenAI-compatible endpoint).
`OPENAI_TOKEN`	LLM API key.
`OPENAI_MODEL`	LLM model name (default: `gpt-4o-mini`).
`EMBEDDING_PROVIDER`	Embedding provider: `openai`, `ollama`, `onnx`, `mock`.
`EMBEDDING_MODEL`	Embedding model name.
`EMBEDDING_DIMENSIONS`	Embedding vector dimensions.
`EMBEDDING_ENDPOINT`	Embedding API base URL (falls back to `OPENAI_URL`).
`EMBEDDING_API_KEY`	Embedding API key (falls back to `OPENAI_TOKEN`).
`MOCK_EMBEDDING`	Set `true` to use zero-vector mock embeddings (no model download).
`COGNEE_BINDING_SUPPRESS_LOGS`	Suppress the auto-installed stderr fmt subscriber.
`COGNEE_HOST_SDK`	Suppress binding-armed analytics when the host is an embedding SDK.
`TELEMETRY_DISABLED`, `ENV`	Standard analytics opt-outs for `setupTelemetryAnalytics()`.
`RUST_LOG`, `LOG_LEVEL`	`tracing-subscriber` env-filter level overrides.
`COGNEE_LOG_*`, `LOG_FILE_NAME`	Consumed by `setupLogging()`.
`OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT`, `OTEL_SERVICE_NAME`, `OTEL_*`	Consumed by `setupTelemetry()`.

The logging and telemetry variables are read by the setup functions described in Runtime and Observability.

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