Add the Cognee MCP server to VS Code

Prerequisites

• VS Code installed.
• LLM_API_KEY — API key for the LLM provider Cognee uses to extract the graph and answer queries (OpenAI by default).

Setup

{
  "servers": {
    "cognee": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "run",
        "-i",
        "--rm",
        "-e",
        "TRANSPORT_MODE=stdio",
        "-e",
        "LLM_API_KEY",
        "cognee/cognee-mcp:main"
      ],
      "env": {
        "LLM_API_KEY": "<LLM_API_KEY>"
      }
    }
  }
}

Gotchas

• VS Code uses the `servers` key (not `mcpServers`) and requires `type`.

VS Code is the exception to every other client: its top-level key is "servers", not "mcpServers", and each entry needs an explicit "type" (for example "http" or "stdio"). Secrets are not inlined; instead you declare an "inputs" array and reference each value as ${input:id}, so VS Code prompts for it once and never writes it to disk. Remote servers connect natively with OAuth.