Get to know Pinokio

Pinokio: the easiest way to deploy Gen AI applications on your PC or MAC

Ok, we need to talk about my new favorite thing: Pinokio! Pinokio is the easiest way to deploy Gen AI applications like ComfyUI, Stable Diffusion Web UI, Kohya, and Open WebUI on Windows, Linux and Mac devices. Pinokio is a desktop browser that lets you install, run, and programmatically control these and many other applications, automatically.

Why should you care? Well, if you’re like me and you enjoy experimenting with all the new tools and apps from the Gen AI open-source community, you know it can be painful to setup and manage all the different packages and dependencies that come with installing open-source software. No one wants to spend hours and hours troubleshooting python libraries and broken file paths.

With Pinokio, you don’t need to know anything about the command line, Git, Huggingface, or any of the other nerdy stuff most hackers use to manage their Gen AI toolbelts. To use Gen AI apps with Pinokio, you simply download the app browser to your machine and then let it do its scripting magic to deploy and manage applications for you. Pinokio is a virtual computer that installs and runs everything locally on your Windows, Mac, or Linux computer, so your data is never stored on an external server and there are no API access fees to pay.

How to get Started with Pinokio

1.      Download and Install Pinokio - Head over to the Pinokio site and download the correct .zip archive for your computer.  Pinokio is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Then Unzip and install Pinokio on your device.

2.      After installation, launch the Pinokio app and click “Discover”. On the Discover page, you’ll see all the available applications that have been scripted to deploy using Pinokio. With Pinokio, you’ve got a lot of options! Want to try your hand with ComfyUI for text-to-image generation with the latest Stable Diffusion or FLUX models? Go for it, you can install it in a few clicks. Or maybe you want to install your own chatbot on your local device, go ahead and give Open WebUI a try. Heard about Stable Diffusion UI from Automatic1111, but were too afraid to try and set it up on your machine? Pinokio’s got that too! In addition to these popular tools, there are applications for audio and video generation, advanced photo editing, 3-D image creation, captioning, LORA management, intelligent agents, and more.

Pinokio Browser for Windows - Discover Page

Flux-WebUI, installed in the Pinokio Browser

Since I already have most of these applications set up on my modeling workstation, I wanted to try out something new. So, I decided to give the new Flux-webui app a shot. Flux-webui is a simple UI for creating generative images with the FLUX.1 [Schnell] model from Black Forest Labs.

To install Flux-WebUI, I found the app on the ‘Discover’ page in Pinokio, clicked download, followed the prompts to allow Pinokio to install related dependencies, and then voila! Flux-WebUI was ready to go. Once installed, new applications will appear in the Pinokio browser window. Here’s a look at Flux-WebUI after installation.

One note about Flux-WebUI, it needs to download the FLUX.1 [Schnell] model the first time you prompt for an image, so it’s going to hang on your first prompt…for a while! Schnell is a very large file (24GB), so it will take some time depending on your download speeds. Once Schnell downloads, you’re good to go, and you can prompt away. Flux-WebUI provides some simple configurable parameters, like image size, number of inference steps, number of images, and seed settings. It’s no ComfyUI, but if you just want to check out FLUX.1 and use it to create fun images on your desktop, this is a great way to get started.

Using Pinokio

Pinokio Browser Home Page with Installed Apps

Once you’ve setup your apps in Pinokio, you’ll see them featured on the Pinokio home page whenever you launch the app. From the home page, all you need to do is click an app to launch it in a new browser window.

If you want to run multiple apps in a session, simply click ‘+Window’ to launch another app in a new browser window. I noticed that Pinokio doesn’t maintain state in an individual browser window, so if you’re creating images in Flux-WebUI for example, and then navigate to Explore in that same browser window, your session in Flux-WebUI will begin anew when you return to it. Keep that in mind as you start working with the apps. You’ll want separate windows open for each app you’re running workflows in.

Files for each app are easily accessed by clicking “Files” in the left hand nav menu. If you’re generating images, it’s helpful to know where all your images are landing on your device. In the case of Flux-WebUI, they are in the “Output” folder for future reference.

I’m excited to explore more of the apps available in Pinokio (Open WebUI is next on my list!). What apps are you going to try? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.