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

2.7 KiB

Friendly Kobold

A koboldcpp manager. FriendlyKobold Icon

Core Features

  • modern UI for koboldcpp 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)
  • added presets for a basic flux or chroma image generation setup

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
    

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 The app size should drop from ~110MB to ~10MB; however, users on obsolete OSes (with outdated WebViews) will very likely encounter issues.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