mold

Local AI image and video generation on your own GPU. Mold supports NVIDIA CUDA and Apple Silicon Metal, with a CLI, native desktop app, web studio, mobile companions, Discord bot, and REST/SSE API built on the same engine.

Documentation · Models · Desktop guide · API

Install

Stable release:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/utensils/mold/main/install.sh | sh

Nightly CLI from the latest published main build:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/utensils/mold/main/install.sh | MOLD_CHANNEL=nightly sh

The installer selects a compatible build and verifies its checksum. Linux x86_64 clients without a visible NVIDIA GPU receive a GPU-free CLI. To use only remote GPU hosts, including from a machine with NVIDIA hardware:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/utensils/mold/main/install.sh | MOLD_BACKEND=cpu sh
MOLD_HOST=http://gpu-server:7680 mold run "a cat"

The CPU archive needs no NVIDIA driver or CUDA libraries. Local GPU generation requires a CUDA build (or Metal on macOS). See the installation guide for Nix, Arch, Windows, Android, and source builds. GH200, GB200, and GB300 require future linux/arm64 artifacts and are unsupported.

Mold no longer publishes new versions to crates.io. Existing registry versions are historical; use GitHub releases, Nix, Docker, AUR, or a source build for current versions.

Quick start

# Generate with the default model
mold run "a cat riding a motorcycle through neon-lit streets"

# Choose a model and reproducible seed
mold run flux-dev:q4 "a sunset over mountains" --seed 42

# Edit an image
mold run qwen-image-edit-2511:q4 "make the chair red" --image chair.png

# Edit from reference images (repeat --reference; order is semantic)
mold run flux2-klein:bf16 "the woman from image 1 wearing the glasses from image 2" \
  --reference person.jpg --reference glasses.jpg

# Generate video
mold run ltx-video-0.9.6-distilled:bf16 "a fox in the snow" --frames 25

# Turn a photo into a 3D mesh
mold run hunyuan3d-mini-turbo --image chair.png -o chair.glb
mold run hunyuan3d-2mv-turbo --front chair-front.png --left chair-left.png --back chair-back.png -o chair.glb

# Upscale a Library video as a durable framewise job
mold video-upscale create clip.mp4 --wait

# Launch the web studio and API
mold serve

Models download automatically on first use. Generated media is saved locally with prompt, model, seed, and generation metadata. Framewise video upscale also needs the host codec bridge: Nix packages and CUDA containers include it, while raw binary installs must provide ffmpeg and ffprobe on PATH before the server advertises that feature.

What it supports

• Models: FLUX.1, Flux.2, Stable Diffusion, Z-Image, Qwen-Image, Wuerstchen, LTX Video, Wan, MiniMax H3, and Hunyuan3D. See the model catalog for variants and hardware requirements. Wan's 1.3B BF16 and 5B Q8/FP16 paths are performance-qualified on Apple Metal as well as CUDA; fp8-scaled Wan checkpoints remain CUDA-only. MiniMax H3's compact runtime is supported on SM89 CUDA and Apple Metal; Metal admission checks each request against live unified-memory headroom. Forced-local H3 execution accepts one FL2VA request; batches, sequences, and Ref2VA reference uploads require the server route.
• Images: text-to-image, image editing, inpainting, ControlNet, LoRA, identity photos, reference-image prompting, prompt expansion, and upscaling.
• Video and audio: text/image-to-video, sequences, clip continuation, lip dub, text-to-audio, and MP4 output with generated audio.
• 3D: single-image and named multiview-to-mesh with Hunyuan3D 2.0 and 2.1, automatic background removal, optional highlight and lighting removal, and Hunyuan3D Paint PBR materials in CUDA builds. Shape transformers can be locally derived as qualified FP8/GGUF tiers with mold quantize, which registers the derived tier on the host that made it. Results are published to the Library as binary glTF with a rendered poster tile, exportable as OBJ, an OBJ+PBR ZIP, STL, or PLY, or shared as a turntable GIF, APNG, or WebP. The web and desktop 3-D Studio also runs durable text-to-3D, supplied-mesh texturing, and Hunyuan3D 2.1 mesh-rebuild workflows through the shape VAE: each stage survives app or server restarts and can be resumed from its checkpoint. Its machine picker routes model discovery, workflow history, submission, progress, and results to one explicit connected host, including that host's API key. Painted prints expose their base-color, metallic-roughness, and normal maps as independent, digest-checked Library downloads on web, desktop, and mobile.
• Multiple machines: connect local, LAN, Tailscale, and RunPod hosts, then route work and browse one combined Library.
• Organization: title, favorite, tag, collect, restore, and manage prints across the desktop and web apps.

Model weights keep their own licenses. See each model page for terms and current platform support.

Mold Studio

The desktop app puts New image, Queue, My images, Styles, Machines, and Settings in one window, in plain words, with six themes, for local and remote generation. It also pairs with the iPhone and Android companions.

Download Mold for macOS (Apple Silicon) · Explore the desktop app

Download Mold for Windows (x86_64) — a self-signed NSIS installer. The published build is CPU / remote-hosts only; see the desktop guide for the CUDA recipe. Verify and explicitly trust the release's mold-windows-self-signing.cert.cer before installing; the certificate is not publicly trusted and does not suppress SmartScreen on its own.

Linux desktop builds are source/CI distributions for now — nix build .#mold-desktop or the devshell's desktop-build CUDA AppImage. See the desktop guide.

Android uses the same remote-only Mold Studio mobile interface. Download the signed universal nightly APK directly; there is no zip to unpack:

Download nightly Android APK · Android installation guide

More ways to create

Preview generations directly in supported terminals:

mold run "a cat" --preview

Inline image generation in Ghostty with --preview

Run the engine where the GPU lives and connect from another machine:

mold serve                                      # GPU machine
MOLD_HOST=http://gpu-server:7680 mold run "a cat"  # laptop

--offload also applies to remote renders and durable sequences on GPU hosts. Add --no-save to keep one render out of a server's Library; the host still publishes the print and moves it straight to trash, so mold trash restore gets it back until retention sweeps it. It applies to renders a server performs — a local render has no Library, and refuses the flag rather than ignoring it.

Pass --fit beside --image when the source and the canvas disagree. Without it the picture decides the canvas; with it the canvas is what you asked for and the picture is resampled onto it — crop-fill trims the edges, pad-fit adds black borders, lanczos-resize stretches.

mold run flux-dev:q4 "a lighthouse at dusk" --image wide.png --fit crop-fill --width 1024 --height 1024

A sequence of several clips is scripted, not composed in an app:

mold chain validate shot.toml
mold run --script shot.toml --output walk.mp4
mold jobs list

A 3-D render can be one shot or a durable workflow. A workflow keeps every stage — the picture it starts from, its matted and delighted copies, the shape, the paint — as its own retained artifact, reports each stage as it changes state, and resumes after a restart. It lives on the machine that runs it:

mold mesh-workflow create --prompt "a small ceramic fox" --texture --follow
mold mesh-workflow create --mesh chair.glb --image chair-albedo.png
mold mesh-workflow list

Find weights to install, and watch them arrive:

mold search "anime style" --kind lora
mold pull flux-dev:q4
mold downloads watch

See the remote workflow and RunPod guides. Use mold queue to manage remote work and mold library to browse and organize the host's prints, including mold library source-media to recover the conditioning image a print was made from and mold trash delete to remove one permanently. To install Mold's Agent Skill for supported coding agents, run:

mold skill install --detected

The installed bundle uses each agent's native metadata and discovery contract, with a concise router, safety guidance, tested examples, and the prompting corpus: a shared guide, one complete base guide per manifest family (prompt style, syntax, generation context, examples, pitfalls, and that family's CLI examples), task leaves for the distinct H3, Wan, and LTX-2 grammars, and model leaves for checkpoints with quirks of their own. The corpus in crates/mold-core/src/prompting/ is also what mold expand, mold remix, --expand, the app Expand and Remix actions, and the MCP expand_prompt / remix_prompt tools hand to the LLM, together with the exact model, canvas, frame count, fps, and ordered references, so agents and the expander follow one set of rules. Hunyuan3D's base guide is the one that tells an agent NOT to write a prompt.

macOS Metal memory

Use mold system metal-memory status to inspect this Mac, or mold gpu list --json for a running host. Explicit root-only set <MiB> / reset commands support an optional boot policy with --persist. See the Metal memory guide for budget accounting, local-only administration and rollback semantics. Z-Image's Metal whole-decode path retries with tiles on memory errors and preserves the eager CPU fallback. CPU/CUDA decode ordering is unchanged; see the VAE qualification record.

Project

Mold is a Rust workspace built on candle. The documentation covers the CLI, configuration, deployment, and HTTP API.

Core contributors: James Brink and Jeffrey Dilley.

Licensed under the MIT License. Third-party components and model licenses are listed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md and the model documentation. InsightFace identity weights require separate acceptance and are limited to non-commercial research use.

Model checksums are verified when files are downloaded. Complete installed models queue and switch without full checksum scans, including after restart. To check existing bytes explicitly, run mold info MODEL --verify. Normal loading still checks file sizes and formats; it does not guarantee detection of same-size corruption.

The public website privacy policy describes Google Analytics on the documentation website. Analytics loads automatically without a popup; this integration is not included in Mold apps or servers.