The Cognee MCP server is a multi-functional tool for managing knowledge graphs with four main capabilities:
Cognify: Converts text into a structured knowledge graph
Codify: Transforms a codebase into a knowledge graph
Search: Allows searching within the knowledge graph with customizable search types
Prune: Simplifies and optimizes the knowledge graph as needed
cognee MCP server
Installing Manually
A MCP server project
Clone the cognee repo
Install dependencies
Activate the venv with
Add the new server to your Claude config:
The file should be located here: ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/
You need to create claude_desktop_config.json in this folder if it doesn't exist Make sure to add your paths and LLM API key to the file bellow Use your editor of choice, for example Nano:
Restart your Claude desktop.
Installing via Smithery
To install Cognee for Claude Desktop automatically via Smithery:
Define cognify tool in server.py Restart your Claude desktop.
To use debugger, run:
Open inspector with timeout passed:
To apply new changes while developing cognee you need to do:
poetry lockin cognee folderuv sync --dev --all-extras --reinstallmcp dev src/server.py
Development
In order to use local cognee build, run in root of the cognee repo:
After the build process is done, change the cognee library dependency inside the cognee-mcp/pyproject.toml from
to
After that add the following snippet to the same file (cognee-mcp/pyproject.toml).