gerbil/README.md
2025-08-19 16:14:10 -07:00

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# Friendly Kobold
A koboldcpp manager. <!-- markdownlint-disable MD033 -->
<img src="assets/icon.png" alt="FriendlyKobold Icon" width="32" height="32">
<!-- markdownlint-enable MD033 -->
## Core Features
- modern UI for [koboldcpp](https://github.com/LostRuins/koboldcpp) with full support for Linux Wayland
- download and keep up-to-date your [koboldcpp](https://github.com/LostRuins/koboldcpp/releases) binary
- better surface the ROCm-specific builds of koboldcpp from YellowRoseCx and from [koboldai.org](https://koboldai.org/cpplinuxrocm)
- 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)
- added presets for a basic flux or chroma image generation setup
### Prerequisites
- **[Volta](https://volta.sh/)** - JavaScript tool manager (installs correct Node.js + Yarn versions automatically)
### Setup
1. **Install Volta** (if not already installed):
```bash
curl https://get.volta.sh | bash
```
2. Clone the repository
3. Install dependencies (Volta will auto-install the correct Node.js and Yarn versions):
```bash
yarn
```
4. Start the development server:
```bash
yarn dev
```
### Windows ROCm Support
There is ROCm Windows support maintained by YellowRoseCx in a separate fork.
Unfortunately it does not properly support unpacking, which would greatly diminish its performance and provide a poor UX when used alongside this app.
For Friendly Kobold to work with this fork, this issue must be fixed first: https://github.com/YellowRoseCx/koboldcpp-rocm/issues/129
### 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 The app size should drop from ~110MB to ~10MB; however, users on obsolete OSes (with outdated WebViews) will very likely encounter issues.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.
### Dev notes
- Maximum compression doesn't work well on Linux and causes the app start time to be over 30 secs. Reducing compression for Linux's AppImage builds, which increases file size by ~20MB, but makes its start up time reasonable again.
## License
AGPL v3 License - see LICENSE file for details