The amount of times I have seen people have issues setting up SillyTavern is insane. I wrote a guide once, but it got lost to time, and so this time, I’m posting it on my own website. In the event this guide goes down, well, I’ve either lost power, internet, or I haven’t paid my domain bill. I’ll probably copy it somewhere else at some point anyway, although if it ends up elsewhere, it will likely lack my usual flavour of written word. Cry about it.
This will be the first of probably three guides. The first will be getting SillyTavern set up and running locally on a Windows PC. The second will probably be going over the common settings, what they do, things like that. The third will probably be doing a deeper dive into things like Tailscale and/or Cloudflare and/or reverse proxies to allow access to the SillyTavern instance from anywhere.
At the bottom of each guide, I’ll probably put a tl;dr section which is just dot points for anyone who doesn’t like reading. If you can’t read, on the other hand, you’re going to have a bad time here.
Let’s begin.
Note: If you have an IQ that’s above body temperature, you can probably just follow the setup steps provided by SillyTavern HERE.
This AI gooner is a bit up himself, isn't he? A three-part tutorial, he reckons?
Before we begin, I’ll explain my current setup, partly so you can understand where I’m coming from, and partly because I’m a massive fucking nerd and I like mucking about with all of this and also talking about. If this is a problem, please see the first three words of this article’s first paragraph.
My personal SillyTavern instance is running on a virtual machine on my home server. Yes, it’s running on a Windows VM, not it’s not running in a container, Br I cannot express to you how much I do not care about how much faster, or cooler, or easier Docker is. Write your own setup tutorial for Docker. While I do have a Tailscale mesh VPN set up, rather than use that, I have a reverse proxy set up on a different VM with the required ports, and I have an A record in Cloudflare set up so I can access it via a hostname (which is based) and not an IP address (which is cringe).
tl;dr I overengineered a solution because I’m an idiot.
But it does mean I can open up a browser on any device, anywhere in the world, with or without Tailscale, log into my SillyTavern instance, and all of my chats, bots and settings will be identical. That’s based, by the way, for those keeping score at home.
And now, because there hasn't been anything moving in five minutes
Step 1: Git? More like, uh, what is all this nerd shit?
Unfortunately for those of you with room-temperature IQ (see left), SillyTavern is not a simple file that you download, double-click, and run. There’s a little bit more to it than that.
To begin, you’ll need to install both NodeJS and Git to your PC. What do these do exactly? Who fuckin’ knows, Google it. NodeJS is something something JavaScript code nerd bullshit that I neither know about, nor care to learn about. Git is basically version control, and code nerds use it so a bunch of them can work on the same codebase at the same time, and push changes, without code collisions. If I got those explanations wrong, I literally do not care.
Part 1: NodeJS
Really fuckin’ easy. Go HERE and click the ‘Windows Installer (MSI)’ button below the big scary code block. I’m not even going to give you a screenshot for this, because if you genuinely cannot use your eyes to find a button to download a program, I cannot help you, and indeed, nobody can. I wish you luck with life after your recent lobotomy. Latest version is fine. As mentioned by the ST developers, ST cannot be set up Windows 7 or older.
After it’s downloaded, install it. Click next a bunch of times, and when you get to the page with the checkbox about Tools for Native Modules, tick the box and continue. I don’t even know if this is mandatory, but I’ve never not clicked it. Keep clicking next until it starts installing, then you wait.
After the installation is done, a command prompt will appear talking about the Native Modules thing. Read it, or don’t, I don’t care, just press space twice and wait for the Powershell shit to finish. It’ll take a while. Just be patient. Scroll back up and watch that Subway Surfers gif if you think it’ll help. When it’s done, it’ll say Press ENTER to exit.
Part 2: Git
Once again, no screenshots, because it’s downloading a program and clicking ‘Next’ a lot. Link is HERE.
Defaults for everything is fine. Only thing I’d suggest, if you care, which you don’t, is to change the text editor from Vim to Nano (shut the fuck up, Br, I literally do not care). Then just keep mashing ‘Next’ until the installation is complete. Dead simple.
Step 2: Oh God Command Lines Scare Me
After you’ve installed those two programs, create a new folder somewhere that isn’t a protected folder (i.e. don’t fucking try to install SillyTavern into System32, you fucking wanker). For the purposes of this demonstration, I will be using C:\Software. Go into that folder, and at the address bar at the top of the File Explorer window, type cmd and hit Enter to open a command prompt window.
Once the window has opened, and you’re looking at spooky white text on a black background, I need you to do your best Matrix hacker impersonation, and copy and paste the following text into that window:
git clone https://github.com/SillyTavern/SillyTavern -b release
No, I will not be providing the link to the Staging branch. If you know the difference between Release and Staging, you don’t need this guide anyway.
Now that the repository has been cloned into the local folder, go into the folder that was just created (for me, that would be C:\Software\SillyTavern) and double-click on start.bat to install the required dependencies. What does that mean? It means click the fucking .bat file. If you click the .sh file by accident, that’s a you problem and you need to learn how to read better.
Once everything is installed, the command prompt will say to go to http://127.0.0.1:8000 to open SillyTavern. However, by default, your browser will open automatically and load SillyTavern for you. Wow. Incredible. So easy, so fast, how do so many people have so many issues with this!?
There are, of course, some things to keep in mind:
- Closing the command prompt window will kill SillyTavern. That window must always be running.
- This means you cannot shut down your computer if you try to access your ST instance elsewhere (i.e. on a phone or another computer).
- There are Update and Update & Start .bat files in the folder you created. If you need me to explain what they do, please hit your head against a wall until the question goes away.
- This instance, currently, can only be accessed on your local machine. I think you need to forward ports on your router for it to be accessible on other machines on your local network, but I haven’t tested it, so I don’t know. Give it a shot!
In Conclusion
This shit easy, even for an idiot like me, so I don’t know what everyone else was complaining about, honestly. The instructions on the ST Github page are perfectly readable.
If you already know where to get bots from, and don’t mind mucking about with the settings yourself, then you’re good to go. Have fun!
I will do up a second guide probably around [insert future date here] to cover settings and things like that. Or maybe I won’t! I don’t owe you anything!
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