Dev Log is a way for me to share what I’ve been working on, what I’ve tried & failed at. This is part of Dev Log series where I learn new stuff and document some of the pet projects.

Today’s log is about ComfyUI, a powerful AI generation workflow tool (generates images and videos). I just started and this log is mostly for setting things up.

The setup

Hardware:

• Linux PopOS

• NVIDIA GTX 4070 (may or may not be optional)

If you don’t have GPU, running on CPU is fine but beware, it takes significantly longer time to do anything related to AI generation.

Software:

• GPU drivers (installation guide that I use)

  • Mainly I check available drivers using sudo ubuntu-drivers list 

  • For some reason I couldn’t use ubuntu-drivers command to install. But if you can, you should.

  • I ended up using nvidia-driver-535 by installing it through APT sudo apt install nvidia-driver

• Python

  • I had python installed, if you don’t, Google how to install it.

The basic setup

Now, you should be able to follow instructions on ComfyUI Github. I did manual installation which I recommend if you’re a developer.

Once you have the base function up and running. You should install what’s called a custom node manager

Custom node manager handles:

• Installation of missing models, clip, etc.

• Managing versions of other custom nodes (including itself).

• Installation of other custom nodes

Run basic SDXL setup

Here’s some interesting workflows to run (I haven’t personally run them, but I was just skimming through some interesting ones):

• 3d mesh generator

• Basic SDXL flow (there’s a lot more here)

Learning materials

• https://openart.ai/workflows/academy

Run on the cloud

If you do not have any GPUs, you will want to use cloud services to run your app.

I am not affiliated with Modal but I’ve tried running ComfyUI on Modal the getting started sample works pretty well.

I’m trying to make it run with my own workflow. I still have some issues with getting it running.

I’ll be talking about this next couple of Tuesdays!