gerbil/README.md
2025-08-16 11:01:20 -07:00

2.2 KiB

FriendlyKobold

A koboldcpp manager.

Core Features

  • modern UI with full support for Linux Wayland
  • download and keep up-to-date your koboldcpp binary
  • better surface the ROCm-specific builds of koboldcpp from YellowRoseCx and from koboldai.org
  • manage the koboldcpp binary to prevent it from running in the background indefinitely
  • automatically unpack all downloaded koboldcpp binaries for significantly faster operation and reduced RAM+HDD utilization (up to ~4GB less RAM usage for ROCm)

Prerequisites

  • Volta - JavaScript tool manager (installs correct Node.js + Yarn versions automatically)

Setup

  1. Install Volta (if not already installed):

    curl https://get.volta.sh | bash
    
  2. Clone the repository

  3. Install dependencies (Volta will auto-install the correct Node.js and Yarn versions):

    yarn
    
  4. Start the development server:

    yarn dev
    

Linux Wayland support

Additional configurations have been written to help with ideal Wayland support, but as per current Electron guidelines, the user should set ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT to wayland in their environment variable according to the Electron Environment Variables documentation.

Future features

Not all koboldcpp features have currently been ported over the UI. As a workaround one may use the "Additional arguments" on the "Advanced" tab of the launcher to provide additional command line arguments if you know them.

Future considerations

It would make a lot of sense to transition this project to Tauri from Electron. The app size should drop from ~80MB to ~10MB; however, users on obsolete OSes (with outdated WebViews) will very likely encounter issues. In addition, I would need to learn Rust to rewrite the BE (Electron main code), but at least we can re-use all the React code. The app would be much smaller, faster and memory efficient, but not work for some users. I think it's a worthy tradeoff.

License

AGPL v3 License - see LICENSE file for details