Prerequisites
What you need installed before running LocalLens.
LocalLens runs on Bun and reaches for a few node:* modules where it
needs them.
Required
- Bun
>=1.3.0— runtime, test runner, bundler. - Node
>=22.17.0— used by TypeScript and a handful ofnode:APIs. - QVAC SDK — installed automatically
by
bun install. Model weights download on first use.
Recommended
- A machine that can run a 1.7B-parameter quantized model. If it can't, LocalLens falls back to the 600M variant the first time it tries to load the chat model.
- A few hundred megabytes of free disk for QVAC's model cache and your brains' embeddings.
No API keys required
LocalLens doesn't call any hosted service. No OpenAI key, no Tether key, nothing similar. The one bit of network traffic is the initial model download, which Bun caches.
Where everything lives
| Path | What is there |
|---|---|
~/.cache/qvac/ (or platform equivalent) | Downloaded model weights |
<repo>/.locallens/store.json | Brain registry and chunks |
| QVAC workspace dir | Embedding indices, one per brain |
The next pages walk through: