Requirements
The short answer
Any machine with Docker, 8 GB of RAM and 50 GB of free disk will run Chronicler. Whether it runs pleasantly depends mostly on whether it has a GPU.
Memory
The number that matters is the memory Docker can use, not the memory in the machine. On Windows and macOS, Docker runs inside a VM with its own allocation — see Performance and memory for how to raise it.
| Docker memory | What you get |
|---|---|
| Under 4 GB | Won't work. The backend gets killed as soon as a model loads. |
| 4–8 GB | Runs, small model only, slow. Fine for trying it out. |
| 8–16 GB | Comfortable for a handful of people with the default model. |
| 16 GB+ | Room for a larger model, or several people asking at once. |
Graphics card
Optional, and the single biggest difference to how the product feels.
- No GPU — everything works, on the CPU. A cold answer takes one to three minutes; once the model is warm, answers come in tens of seconds.
- NVIDIA — answers in seconds. Needs the NVIDIA Container Toolkit so that containers can see the card (on Windows, a current driver plus Docker Desktop's WSL2 backend).
- AMD — supported on Linux only, via ROCm, and best-effort: it works on common cards but is less tested than NVIDIA.
- Apple Silicon — the GPU cannot be passed into Docker at all, so a self-hosted stack on a Mac is CPU-only whatever the machine.
Roughly which model suits which machine — the full list, with what each is good at, is on Models:
| Hardware | Model |
|---|---|
| No GPU, 8 GB RAM | gemma4:e2b — the default |
| No GPU, 16 GB RAM | gemma4:e4b — better answers, slower on CPU |
| 8 GB VRAM | qwen2.5vl:7b |
| 10 GB VRAM | gemma4:12b |
| 20–24 GB VRAM | gemma4:26b / gemma4:31b |
Disk
| Item | Size |
|---|---|
| Container images | ~6 GB |
| Default model | ~3 GB (larger models: 6–20 GB) |
| Database and documents | Grows with your library — budget several times the size of your files, since text and search index are stored alongside them |
50 GB free is a sane starting point; 100 GB if you're indexing a large archive. The Admin → Settings page caps how much of the disk Chronicler will use.
Operating system
Windows 10/11 with Docker Desktop using the WSL2 backend.
The Hyper-V backend cannot pass a GPU through to containers at all. If you have a graphics card and want to use it, switch in Docker Desktop → Settings → General → Use the WSL 2 based engine.
Any distribution with Docker Engine 24+ and the Compose plugin. This is the best platform for a shared server: no VM in the way, and both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs can be used.
docker --version
docker compose version
Network
- The app reaches the server on port 8410. On one machine that's
http://localhost:8410; for colleagues it'shttp://<server-ip>:8410. - Outbound HTTPS to
api.chroniclerlm.comfor licence checks, and to Docker Hub and GitHub for installs and updates. - Exposing the server beyond a trusted network means putting HTTPS in front of it — see Security and networking.
A licence key
Self-hosted servers require one. Without it the server starts, but the parts that touch documents refuse to work. See Licensing and activation.