Documentation

#Windows

1. Press Download on the home page, or open the latest release and download SillyTavernManager-windows-x64-vX.Y.Z-setup.exe.
2. Open the downloaded installer. If Windows SmartScreen warns about an unrecognized app, click More info and then Run anyway.
3. Complete the installer. It installs into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\SillyTavernManager without asking for administrator rights, and creates Start Menu and Desktop shortcuts.
4. Open SillyTavern Manager. The desktop app opens straight into the manager console.

Closing the window hides the app to the system tray so SillyTavern and your links keep running in the background, and desktop notifications alert you when a character finishes replying. Right-click the tray icon to open the manager, open SillyTavern, open your data folder, or press Stop & Quit to shut down SillyTavern and the Cloudflare tunnel cleanly.

To update, press Update on the banner in the manager console, or download the new installer and run it over the old one. Your data stays.

#Android: the app

The easiest way on a phone. One app holds the manager and everything SillyTavern needs; there is no Termux and no command to type. It runs on 64-bit Android phones from Android 7 on, which is nearly every phone sold since 2017.

1. Open the home page on your phone and press Download for Android, or download SillyTavernManager-android-arm64-v8a-vX.Y.Z.apk from the latest release.
2. Open the downloaded file. Android asks whether your browser may install apps: allow it, then press Install. The app is not on the Play Store, so Play Protect may call it unknown; choose Install anyway.
3. Open ST Manager. The first start unpacks what the app carries and takes about a minute.
4. On Android 13 and later, allow notifications when asked. The manager keeps running in the background with a notification that says so.
5. Choose a password, pick a SillyTavern version and press Install. It downloads a few hundred megabytes and takes a few minutes; the screen can be off.

The manager keeps running when you leave the app or swipe it away, so SillyTavern stays open for your other devices. To stop everything, press Stop on its notification.

To update, download the new APK and install it over the old one. Your data stays.

Moving over from Termux

Ran SillyTavern in Termux before? The overview asks Used SillyTavern in Termux? on a fresh install; Move my data copies your chats, characters and settings into the app. Later, Move from Termux on the Data page does the same.

Android’s folder picker opens: open its menu, choose Termux, tap Use this folder, then Allow. The app reads the SillyTavern in it and restores it here. Termux is left exactly as it was, and what the app had before is kept as a backup named Before moving from Termux, so the move can be undone.

Chat bubbles

When a character replies while you are in another app, the app can show the reply as a chat bubble floating over it, the way a messenger does; tap it to answer right there. The overview offers it once (Get replies as chat bubbles?), and the bell at the top turns Chat bubbles and Message notifications from characters on or off at any time. Bubbles need Android 11 or later; on older phones replies are ordinary notifications.

#Android: Termux

Prefer to run it from Termux? Install Termux from F-Droid or another trusted source. Do not use the old Play Store build: it is years out of date and its package manager no longer works.

Open Termux, paste these commands, and press Enter. The first two update Termux itself and take a minute or two; the last one downloads what the manager needs. This is done once.

pkg update -y
pkg upgrade -y
pkg install -y git nodejs-lts
git clone https://github.com/locmaymo/stm.git
cd stm
npm ci

The first time Termux updates, it stops a few times and asks what to do with a settings file (sources.list, bash.bashrc, profile, openssl.cnf) with a line ending in (Y/I/N/O/D/Z) [default=N] ?.

Press Enter each time it asks. That takes the default, N: keep the file you already have. It is the safe answer, nothing is lost, and the update carries on. The question can come several times in a row; keep pressing Enter until the commands finish and the $ prompt is back.

Start the manager

Each time you want to use SillyTavern, open Termux and run:

cd stm
npm start

Termux always opens in its home folder, which is where stm was downloaded, so cd stm finds it. When the box with the addresses appears, open http://127.0.0.1:7860 in the phone’s browser. The second address is for other devices on the same Wi‑Fi.

Update the manager

Stop it with Ctrl+C first, then run:

cd stm
git pull
npm ci
npm start

#macOS: from source

macOS uses the same launcher as Linux. Paste this into Terminal; the first line installs Homebrew and can be skipped if you already have it.

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
brew install git node
git clone https://github.com/locmaymo/stm.git
cd stm
npm ci
node deploy/linux/launcher.mjs

Open http://127.0.0.1:7860. Stop with Ctrl+C, and start it again later with:

cd "$HOME/stm"
node deploy/linux/launcher.mjs

#Linux and VPS

With Node.js 22 or newer and git installed:

git clone https://github.com/locmaymo/stm.git
cd stm
npm ci
node deploy/linux/launcher.mjs

Data goes to $XDG_DATA_HOME/sillytavern-manager, or ~/.local/share/sillytavern-manager when that variable is unset.

To have it come back after a reboot, save this as /etc/systemd/system/sillytavern-manager@.service:

[Unit]
Description=SillyTavern Manager
After=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=%i
WorkingDirectory=/home/%i/stm
ExecStart=/usr/bin/node deploy/linux/launcher.mjs
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now sillytavern-manager@$USER
systemctl status sillytavern-manager@$USER

#Docker and hosted platforms

Build the image from the repository:

git clone https://github.com/locmaymo/stm.git
cd stm
docker build -f deploy/docker/Dockerfile -t sillytavern-manager .

Then run it with durable storage:

docker run --rm \
  -p 7860:7860 \
  -v sillytavern-manager-data:/data \
  -e STM_ADMIN_PASSWORD='choose-a-long-password' \
  sillytavern-manager

The manager is at http://127.0.0.1:7860. SillyTavern stays on the container’s internal port 8002, and a tunnel points only at the access gateway on 8001.

On a hosted container platform: expose 7860, mount durable storage at /data, and supply STM_ADMIN_PASSWORD through the platform’s secret settings.

#npm

On any machine with Node.js 22 or newer:

npx sillytavern-manager

Or install it once and keep it:

npm install --global sillytavern-manager
sillytavern-manager

#Local archives

Back up now writes a ZIP that SillyTavern’s own import understands. By default it leaves out secrets.json, thumbnails, vectors, generated backups, .git, node_modules and operating-system clutter, which is why an archive is far smaller than the data folder. Including secrets is a separate, deliberate choice with a warning attached.

The schedule takes one every 30 minutes, hour, six hours or day when the data has changed, and keeps the newest (STM_LOCAL_BACKUPS keeps more). Create a restore point takes one on purpose, with a note of your own, and the manager never deletes a restore point, an upload or a recovery point brought back from R2 by itself; the safety copy taken before a restore or a profile switch is kept as the undo for the last one. Archives are ordinary files: copy them anywhere.

#Restoring

1. Pick an archive: one the manager made, a recovery point from Google Drive or Cloudflare R2, or a ZIP you upload.
2. Read the preview. It lists what is in the archive before anything is written, and for a replace, which files in the profile the archive does not have.
3. Choose Replace (the default: the profile becomes the archive) or Merge (files in the archive overwrite their counterparts, everything else is left).
4. Confirm. A safety snapshot of the current state is taken first, automatically.

#Google Drive

On the Data page, choose Google Drive and press Connect Google Drive. Sign in with your Google account and allow access, and the manager keeps its recovery points in a hidden app folder in your own Drive. No card, no keys, nothing to create first.

The access asked for is Google’s narrowest one for Drive: a folder that belongs to this app alone. The manager cannot see anything else in your Drive, and the backup files do not show up among your own files, so they cannot be moved or deleted there by accident. Google’s consent screen calls this “its own configuration data”.

A new machine that connects the same Google account finds the same folder, so the recovery points already in it can be restored onto it. Connecting on a second machine makes that one the machine that backs up, and the first one stops.

Disconnect revokes the sign-in. The backups stay in your Drive unless you tick Also delete the backups from Google Drive in the same dialog. You can also remove access yourself at myaccount.google.com/permissions.

#Cloudflare R2

On the Data page, Connect Cloudflare is the whole of the setup. Sign in, choose the account, allow the permissions, and the manager finds or creates a bucket named sillytavern-manager-backup in your account and starts keeping recovery points in it. There are no keys to create or paste.

Two of the permissions are optional and worth allowing:

• Workers. The manager deploys a small Worker, also called sillytavern-manager-backup, that carries backup data to the bucket. It is much faster and does not spend your Cloudflare API rate limit. Without it, backups go through Cloudflare’s API and a first one can take a long time.
• Account Analytics. The panel can then show storage and Class A/B operations as Cloudflare counts them, for the bucket and for the account against the free tier. These are usage figures, not your bill.

A new machine that signs in to the same account finds the same bucket, so the recovery points already in it can be restored onto it.

Disconnect removes this installation’s Worker key and revokes the sign-in. The bucket and everything in it stay yours. You can also revoke access yourself in your Cloudflare profile, under Manage OAuth authorizations.

Prefer not to sign in? Choose R2/S3 keys (manual) and enter the endpoint, bucket and key pair from the R2 page of the Cloudflare dashboard. Any S3-compatible storage works the same way.

#Saver mode

On a machine with little room for files, such as a container that keeps everything in memory or a phone that is nearly full, the archives on the machine are what runs it out. With Saver mode on, no archive is kept on the machine and the profile is on the disk once. Your R2 bucket holds the recovery points and stands in for the safety copy: the current data is sent to R2 before a restore replaces it.

An uploaded ZIP and a recovery point from R2 are written straight into the profile as they arrive, with SillyTavern stopped. The restore is checked against the room there is before it starts; when room is short, the manager offers to leave out what SillyTavern can do without (extensions’ git history and node_modules, SillyTavern’s own backups, thumbnails) and refuses one that still will not fit rather than failing halfway.

It turns itself on when the data directory is kept in memory, or when the disk has less than 5 GiB free as the manager starts, and says which. Otherwise it is a switch under Settings → When the manager opens, or STM_SAVER=1 / STM_SAVER=0 in the environment to settle it for good.

#Bringing a machine back

The bucket also keeps how the manager was set up, beside the data: the manager password and the SillyTavern PIN as the hashes it stores, the ports, the links, Keep STM online, the backup schedules and R2 limits, and the SillyTavern release that was running. The usage figures go there too.

On a new machine, sign in with the same Cloudflare or Google account, on the first-run screen or on the Data page. A profile that is empty while the bucket is not gets the newest recovery point back before SillyTavern starts, and SillyTavern is installed at the release you were running. When the account holds the setup of another of your machines, a card on every page offers Restore everything in one go; SillyTavern is stopped while it runs, and what was on this machine is kept under Backups first.

One account backs up from one machine at a time. Signing in on a second machine makes it the one that backs up; the first stops, gives up its own sign-in and says which machine took over. Signing in there again takes it back.