Jan - Bring AI to your Desktop

Getting Started - Docs - Changelog - Bug reports - Discord

⚠️ Jan is currently in Development: Expect breaking changes and bugs!

Jan is an open-source ChatGPT alternative that runs 100% offline on your computer.

Jan runs on any hardware. From PCs to multi-GPU clusters, Jan supports universal architectures:

• Nvidia GPUs (fast)
• Apple M-series (fast)
• Apple Intel
• Linux Debian
• Windows x64

Download

Version Type	Windows	MacOS		Linux
Stable (Recommended)	jan.exe	Intel	M1/M2	jan.deb	jan.AppImage
Experimental (Nightly Build)	jan.exe	Intel	M1/M2	jan.deb	jan.AppImage

Download the latest version of Jan at https://jan.ai/ or visit the GitHub Releases to download any previous release.

Demo

Realtime Video: Jan v0.4.3-nightly on a Mac M1, 16GB Sonoma 14

Quicklinks

Jan

• Jan website
• Jan GitHub
• User Guides
• Developer docs
• API reference
• Specs

Nitro

Nitro is a high-efficiency C++ inference engine for edge computing. It is lightweight and embeddable, and can be used on its own within your own projects.

• Nitro Website
• Nitro GitHub
• Documentation
• API Reference

Troubleshooting

As Jan is in development mode, you might get stuck on a broken build.

To reset your installation:

1. Use the following commands to remove any dangling backend processes:

   ps aux | grep nitro

   Look for processes like "nitro" and "nitro_arm_64," and kill them one by one with:

   kill -9 <PID>

2. Remove Jan from your Applications folder and Cache folder

   make clean

   This will remove all build artifacts and cached files:

   • Delete Jan extension from your ~/jan/extensions folder
   • Delete all node_modules in current folder
   • Clear Application cache in ~/Library/Caches/jan

Requirements for running Jan

• MacOS: 13 or higher
• Windows:
  • Windows 10 or higher
  • To enable GPU support:
    • Nvidia GPU with CUDA Toolkit 11.7 or higher
    • Nvidia driver 470.63.01 or higher
• Linux:
  • glibc 2.27 or higher (check with ldd --version)
  • gcc 11, g++ 11, cpp 11 or higher, refer to this link for more information
  • To enable GPU support:
    • Nvidia GPU with CUDA Toolkit 11.7 or higher
    • Nvidia driver 470.63.01 or higher

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please read the CONTRIBUTING.md file

Pre-requisites

• node >= 20.0.0
• yarn >= 1.22.0
• make >= 3.81

Instructions

1. Clone the repository and prepare:

   git clone https://github.com/janhq/jan
   cd jan
   git checkout -b DESIRED_BRANCH

2. Run development and use Jan Desktop

   make dev

This will start the development server and open the desktop app.

3. (Optional) Run the API server without frontend

   yarn dev:server

For production build

# Do steps 1 and 2 in the previous section
# Build the app
make build

This will build the app MacOS m1/m2 for production (with code signing already done) and put the result in dist folder.

Docker mode

• Supported OS: Linux, WSL2 Docker

• Pre-requisites:

  • Docker Engine and Docker Compose are required to run Jan in Docker mode. Follow the instructions below to get started with Docker Engine on Ubuntu.

    curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh
    sudo sh ./get-docker.sh --dry-run

  • If you intend to run Jan in GPU mode, you need to install nvidia-driver and nvidia-docker2. Follow the instruction here for installation.

• Run Jan in Docker mode

Docker compose Profile	Description
cpu-fs	Run Jan in CPU mode with default file system
cpu-s3fs	Run Jan in CPU mode with S3 file system
gpu-fs	Run Jan in GPU mode with default file system
gpu-s3fs	Run Jan in GPU mode with S3 file system

Environment Variable	Description
S3_BUCKET_NAME	S3 bucket name - leave blank for default file system
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID	AWS access key ID - leave blank for default file system
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY	AWS secret access key - leave blank for default file system
AWS_ENDPOINT	AWS endpoint URL - leave blank for default file system
AWS_REGION	AWS region - leave blank for default file system
API_BASE_URL	Jan Server URL, please modify it as your public ip address or domain name default http://localhost:1377

• Option 1: Run Jan in CPU mode

  # cpu mode with default file system
  docker compose --profile cpu-fs up -d
  
  # cpu mode with S3 file system
  docker compose --profile cpu-s3fs up -d

• Option 2: Run Jan in GPU mode

  • Step 1: Check CUDA compatibility with your NVIDIA driver by running nvidia-smi and check the CUDA version in the output

    nvidia-smi
    
    # Output
    +---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
    | NVIDIA-SMI 531.18                 Driver Version: 531.18       CUDA Version: 12.1     |
    |-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
    | GPU  Name                      TCC/WDDM | Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
    | Fan  Temp  Perf            Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
    |                                         |                      |               MIG M. |
    |=========================================+======================+======================|
    |   0  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti    WDDM | 00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
    |  0%   44C    P8               16W / 285W|   1481MiB / 12282MiB |      2%      Default |
    |                                         |                      |                  N/A |
    +-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
    |   1  NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti    WDDM | 00000000:02:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
    |  0%   49C    P8               14W / 120W|      0MiB /  6144MiB |      0%      Default |
    |                                         |                      |                  N/A |
    +-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
    |   2  NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti    WDDM | 00000000:05:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
    | 29%   38C    P8               11W / 120W|      0MiB /  6144MiB |      0%      Default |
    |                                         |                      |                  N/A |
    +-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
    
    +---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
    | Processes:                                                                            |
    |  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                            GPU Memory |
    |        ID   ID                                                             Usage      |
    |=======================================================================================|

  • Step 2: Visit NVIDIA NGC Catalog and find the smallest minor version of image tag that matches your CUDA version (e.g., 12.1 -> 12.1.0)

  • Step 3: Update the Dockerfile.gpu line number 5 with the latest minor version of the image tag from step 2 (e.g. change FROM nvidia/cuda:12.2.0-runtime-ubuntu22.04 AS base to FROM nvidia/cuda:12.1.0-runtime-ubuntu22.04 AS base)

  • Step 4: Run command to start Jan in GPU mode

    # GPU mode with default file system
    docker compose --profile gpu-fs up -d
    
    # GPU mode with S3 file system
    docker compose --profile gpu-s3fs up -d

This will start the web server and you can access Jan at http://localhost:3000.

Note: RAG feature is not supported in Docker mode with s3fs yet.

Acknowledgements

Jan builds on top of other open-source projects:

• llama.cpp
• LangChain
• TensorRT

Contact

• Bugs & requests: file a GitHub ticket
• For discussion: join our Discord here
• For business inquiries: email [email protected]
• For jobs: please email [email protected]

License

Jan is free and open source, under the AGPLv3 license.