Skip to content

The InvokeAI Source Installer#

Introduction#

The source installer is a shell script that attempts to automate every step needed to install and run InvokeAI on a stock computer running recent versions of Linux, MacOS or Windows. It will leave you with a version that runs a stable version of InvokeAI with the option to upgrade to experimental versions later.

Before you begin, make sure that you meet the hardware requirements and has the appropriate GPU drivers installed. In particular, if you are a Linux user with an AMD GPU installed, you may need to install the ROCm driver.

Installation requires roughly 18G of free disk space to load the libraries and recommended model weights files.

Walk through#

Though there are multiple steps, there really is only one click involved to kick off the process.

  1. The source installer is distributed in ZIP files. Go to the latest release, and look for a series of files named:

    Download the one that is appropriate for your operating system.

  2. Unpack the zip file into a directory that has at least 18G of free space. Do not unpack into a directory that has an earlier version of InvokeAI.

    This will create a new directory named "InvokeAI". This example shows how this would look using the unzip command-line tool, but you may use any graphical or command-line Zip extractor:

    C:\Documents\Linco> unzip invokeAI-windows.zip
Archive:  C: \Linco\Downloads\invokeAI-linux.zip
creating: invokeAI\
inflating: invokeAI\install.bat
inflating: invokeAI\readme.txt

  3. If you are a macOS user, you may need to install the Xcode command line tools. These are a set of tools that are needed to run certain applications in a Terminal, including InvokeAI. This package is provided directly by Apple.

To install, open a terminal window and run xcode-select --install. You will get a macOS system popup guiding you through the install. If you already have them installed, you will instead see some output in the Terminal advising you that the tools are already installed.

More information can be found here: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/install-xcode-command-line-tools/

  1. If you are using a desktop GUI, double-click the installer file. It will be named install.bat on Windows systems and install.sh on Linux and Macintosh systems.

  2. Alternatively, from the command line, run the shell script or .bat file:

    C:\Documents\Linco> cd invokeAI
C:\Documents\Linco\invokeAI> install.bat

  3. Sit back and let the install script work. It will install various binary requirements including Conda, Git and Python, then download the current InvokeAI code and install it along with its dependencies.

    Be aware that some of the library download and install steps take a long time. In particular, the pytorch package is quite large and often appears to get "stuck" at 99.9%. Similarly, the pip installing requirements step may appear to hang. Have patience and the installation step will eventually resume. However, there are occasions when the library install does legitimately get stuck. If you have been waiting for more than ten minutes and nothing is happening, you can interrupt the script with ^C. You may restart it and it will pick up where it left off.

  4. After installation completes, the installer will launch a script called configure_invokeai.py, which will guide you through the first-time process of selecting one or more Stable Diffusion model weights files, downloading and configuring them.

    Note that the main Stable Diffusion weights file is protected by a license agreement that you must agree to in order to use. The script will list the steps you need to take to create an account on the official site that hosts the weights files, accept the agreement, and provide an access token that allows InvokeAI to legally download and install the weights files.

    If you have already downloaded the weights file(s) for another Stable Diffusion distribution, you may skip this step (by selecting "skip" when prompted) and configure InvokeAI to use the previously-downloaded files. The process for this is described in Installing Models.

  5. The script will now exit and you'll be ready to generate some images. The invokeAI directory will contain numerous files. Look for a shell script named invoke.sh (Linux/Mac) or invoke.bat (Windows). Launch the script by double-clicking it or typing its name at the command-line:

    C:\Documents\Linco> cd invokeAI
C:\Documents\Linco\invokeAI> invoke.bat

The invoke.bat (invoke.sh) script will give you the choice of starting (1) the command-line interface, or (2) the web GUI. If you start the latter, you can load the user interface by pointing your browser at http://localhost:9090.

The invoke script also offers you a third option labeled "open the developer console". If you choose this option, you will be dropped into a command-line interface in which you can run python commands directly, access developer tools, and launch InvokeAI with customized options. To do the latter, you would launch the script scripts/invoke.py as shown in this example:

python scripts/invoke.py --web --max_load_models=3 \
    --model=waifu-1.3 --steps=30 --outdir=C:/Documents/AIPhotos

These options are described in detail in the Command-Line Interface documentation.

Troubleshooting#

Package dependency conflicts If you have previously installed InvokeAI or another Stable Diffusion package, the installer may occasionally pick up outdated libraries and either the installer or invoke will fail with complaints out library conflicts. There are two steps you can take to clear this problem. Both of these are done from within the "developer's console", which you can get to by launching invoke.sh (or invoke.bat) and selecting launch option

3:#

  1. Remove the previous invokeai environment completely. From within the developer's console, give the command conda env remove -n invokeai. This will delete previous files installed by invoke.

Then exit from the developer's console and launch the script update.sh (or update.bat). This will download the most recent InvokeAI (including bug fixes) and reinstall the environment. You should then be able to run invoke.sh/invoke.bat.

  1. If this doesn't work, you can try cleaning your system's conda cache. This is slightly more extreme, but won't interfere with any other python-based programs installed on your computer. From the developer's console, run the command conda clean -a and answer "yes" to all prompts.

After this is done, run update.sh and try again as before.

"Corrupted configuration file."_ Everything seems to install ok, but invoke complains of a corrupted configuration file and goes calls configure_invokeai.py to fix, but this doesn't fix the problem.

This issue is often caused by a misconfigured configuration directive in the .invokeai initialization file that contains startup settings. This can be corrected by fixing the offending line.

First find .invokeai. It is a small text file located in your home directory, ~/.invokeai on Mac and Linux systems, and C:\Users\*your name*\.invokeai on Windows systems. Open it with a text editor (e.g. Notepad on Windows, TextEdit on Macs, or nano on Linux) and look for the lines starting with --root and --outdir.

An example is here:

--root="/home/lstein/invokeai"
--outdir="/home/lstein/invokeai/outputs"

There should not be whitespace before or after the directory paths, and the paths should not end with slashes:

--root="/home/lstein/invokeai "     # wrong! no whitespace here
--root="/home\lstein\invokeai\"     # wrong! shouldn't end in a slash

Fix the problem with your text editor and save as a plain text file. This should clear the issue.

If none of these maneuvers fixes the problem then please report the problem to the InvokeAI Issues section, or visit our Discord Server for interactive assistance.

Updating to newer versions#

This section describes how to update InvokeAI to new versions of the software.

Updating the stable version#

This distribution is changing rapidly, and we add new features on a daily basis. To update to the latest released version (recommended), run the update.sh (Linux/Mac) or update.bat (Windows) scripts. This will fetch the latest release and re-run the configure_invokeai script to download any updated models files that may be needed. You can also use this to add additional models that you did not select at installation time.

You can now close the developer console and run invoke as before. If you get complaints about missing models, then you may need to do the additional step of running configure_invokeai.py. This happens relatively infrequently. To do this, simply open up the developer's console again and type python scripts/configure_invokeai.py.

Troubleshooting#

If you run into problems during or after installation, the InvokeAI team is available to help you. Either create an Issue at our GitHub site, or make a request for help on the "bugs-and-support" channel of our Discord server. We are a 100% volunteer organization, but typically somebody will be available to help you within 24 hours, and often much sooner.

Last update: December 15, 2022
Created: November 12, 2022