Improve quickstart setup experience
Author: nsarrazinCreated Mar 26, 2025Updated Sep 16, 2026
Labelsenhancement
We would like to improve the experience of running chat-ui locally and reduce friction in the setup.
Current pain points:
- Having to setup your DB
- Having to point to an inference server
- Having to deal with either docker or git + npm
The goal is to reduce the friction with the following steps:
- Make the DB optional, use an in-process mongo server if it's not set (#1773)
- Make it possible to download and run models directly from chat-ui (with node-llama-cpp?) #1778
- Allow admin login from CLI à la jupyter notebook (#1789 )
- Add an onboarding UI for setting up new models from the app
- Provide an easy setup like
npx @huggingface/chat-uiorpip - Update the README so it focuses on quickstarting and move the rest of the doc to the docs page
Source: huggingface/chat-ui