Use when the user needs something that ships outside cognee core — community database adapters (Qdrant, Milvus, Weaviate, Redis, Pinecone, FalkorDB, Memgraph, DuckDB, NetworkX, …), data-source connectors (Slack, Gmail, Notion, Confluence, Google Drive), custom tasks/pipelines/retrievers (Exa, ScrapeGraph, codify), Keywords AI observability — or wants to contribute a package to the cognee-community repo.
cognee-cli
cognee-cli is an open-source workflow skill for Claude Code and compatible agents, published by topoteretes. Its author describes it as: “Use when the user wants to drive cognee from the terminal with cognee-cli — remember/recall/forget/improve memory commands, managing datasets and config, or database migrations.”. The project has 30k stars on GitHub and is available under the Apache-2.0 license. Add it to your setup with `git clone https://github.com/topoteretes/cognee ~/.claude/skills/cognee-cli`.
What cognee-cli does
`cognee-cli` ships with the package (entry point in `cognee/cli/_cognee.py`; each command lives in `cognee/cli/commands/`). Every command has `--help` with examples — prefer that over guessing flags. Needs `LLM_API_KEY` configured, same as the SDK.
Installation
Add cognee-cli to your agent with:
git clone https://github.com/topoteretes/cognee ~/.claude/skills/cognee-cliAlways review a skill's source before installing it. This command comes from the skill's public repository; the linked repo is the source of truth for exact setup steps.
What's inside
The SKILL.md for cognee-cli is organised into these sections:
- Core flow
- Session memory and enrichment
- Legacy / lower-level commands
- Management
- Relational DB migrations (Alembic)
- Gotchas
When to use it
Reach for cognee-cli when you want workflow help from your agent without writing the same instructions every session. Load the skill and the agent picks it up automatically for relevant tasks.
Strengths
- Clear Apache-2.0 license — safe to read and adapt
- Ships in topoteretes/cognee, an established project with 30,102 GitHub stars
- Actively maintained (recent commits)
Topics
Frequently asked questions
- What does cognee-cli do?
- Use when the user wants to drive cognee from the terminal with cognee-cli — remember/recall/forget/improve memory commands, managing datasets and config, or database migrations.
- How do I install cognee-cli?
- Run git clone https://github.com/topoteretes/cognee ~/.claude/skills/cognee-cli in your agent, then reload your skills. Review the source at https://github.com/topoteretes/cognee before installing.
- Is cognee-cli free to use?
- Yes. cognee-cli is free and open source under the Apache-2.0 license, so you can read, run, and adapt it within that license's terms.
- Where does cognee-cli come from?
- cognee-cli ships inside topoteretes/cognee, a repository that contains 11 catalogued skills in total. The repository's 30,102 GitHub stars apply to that whole collection, not to this skill on its own.
Related skills
More Workflow →Use when the user wants to install cognee and run their first remember → recall flow with the Python SDK — fresh setup, virtual env, extras selection, or a minimal working example.
Use when working with cognee's permission system — understanding or changing how users, roles, and tenants get access to datasets, how ACL grants work, where permissions are enforced in add/cognify/search/delete, and how the grant records surface in the memory-provenance view.
Use to briefly explain small code diffs.
Use to judge whether a PR review comment sounds polite.