The following example starts sd-server with a standalone diffusion model, VAE, and LLM text encoder:

.\bin\Release\sd-server.exe --diffusion-model  ..\models\diffusion_models\z_image_turbo_bf16.safetensors --vae ..\models\vae\ae.sft  --llm ..\models\text_encoders\qwen_3_4b.safetensors --diffusion-fa --offload-to-cpu -v --cfg-scale 1.0

What this example does:

• --diffusion-model selects the standalone diffusion model
• --vae selects the VAE decoder
• --llm selects the text encoder / language model used by this pipeline
• --diffusion-fa enables flash attention in the diffusion model
• --offload-to-cpu reduces VRAM pressure by keeping weights in RAM when possible
• -v enables verbose logging
• --cfg-scale 1.0 sets the default CFG scale for generation

After the server starts successfully:

• the web UI is available at http://127.0.0.1:1234/
• the native async API is available under /sdcpp/v1/...
• the compatibility APIs are available under /v1/... and /sdapi/v1/...

If you want to use a different host or port, pass:

--listen-ip <ip> --listen-port <port>

The server can optionally build the web frontend and embed it into the binary as gen_index_html.h.

Install the following tools:

• Node.js ≥ 20 https://nodejs.org/

• pnpm ≥ 10 Install via npm:

npm install -g pnpm

Verify installation:

node -v
pnpm -v

Go to the frontend directory and install dependencies:

cd examples/server/frontend
pnpm install

Enable the frontend build option when configuring CMake:

cmake -B build -DSD_SERVER_BUILD_FRONTEND=ON
cmake --build build --config Release

If pnpm is available, the build system will automatically run:

pnpm run build
pnpm run build:header

and embed the generated frontend into the server binary.

The web frontend is maintained in a separate repository, https://github.com/leejet/sdcpp-webui.

If you want to modify the UI or frontend logic, please submit pull requests to the frontend repository.

This repository (stable-diffusion.cpp) only vendors the frontend periodically. Changes from the frontend repo are synchronized:

• approximately every 1–2 weeks, or
• when there are major frontend updates

Because of this, frontend changes will not appear here immediately after being merged upstream.

By default, the server uses the embedded frontend generated during the build (gen_index_html.h).

You can also serve a custom frontend file instead of the embedded one by using:

--serve-html-path <path-to-index.html>

For example:

sd-server --serve-html-path ./index.html

In this case, the server will load and serve the specified index.html file instead of the embedded frontend. This is useful when:

• developing or testing frontend changes
• using a custom UI
• avoiding rebuilding the binary after frontend modifications

For detailed command-line arguments, run:

./bin/sd-server -h