Environment variables

Cortex runtime commands use the following environment variables. Documentation builds use none of them.

Variable	Consumers	Required when	Behavior
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY	ingestion, query, semantic resolution	Making model-backed runtime calls	Read from the process; ingestion and query also fall back to ~/.secrets/anthropic-api-key.
CORTEX_DRIVE_ACCOUNT	paper upload and PDF ingestion	Accessing the private Drive corpus	Google account passed to the gog CLI.
CORTEX_DRIVE_FOLDER_ID	paper upload	Uploading a PDF	Parent Drive folder for new files.
COGNEE_DATA_PATH	ingestion and query	Overriding the default .cognee data root	Sets Cognee's data and system roots for those commands.
GRAPH_DATABASE_PROVIDER	standalone graph and resolution helpers	Selecting a graph backend	Defaults to kuzu; no other provider is implemented.
COGNEE_SKIP_CONNECTION_TEST	Cognee internals	Optional local tuning	Passed through to the dependency; Cortex does not interpret it directly.

Repository .env

scripts.config reads a repository-root .env with simple KEY=VALUE lines. Existing process variables win over values in that file. The supplied .env.example documents Drive and Cognee settings.

Do not commit .env, API keys, credentials, account details, or machine-specific store paths. Prefer a secret manager or protected process environment for keys.

Store-path boundary

Ingestion and query honor COGNEE_DATA_PATH. The standalone graph backend, backup helper, deduplication commands, and alias-registry commands currently operate on the repository's .cognee/ path. Confirm the consumer before assuming one variable retargets every command.