lektor-ai/docs/installation.md

Installation

Two things need to exist: the ComfyUI backend (large, isolated, GPU-bound) and the script (which needs nothing installed at all).

Automated install

install_backend.sh in the project root reproduces the exact working environment. It is idempotent — safe to re-run, and it skips any step already satisfied.

cd ~/Programy/lektor_ai
./install_backend.sh

Roughly 45–90 minutes, almost all of it downloading. Expect ~39 GB: ~22 GB for the speech backend and ~17 GB for the normalizer's own environment and models.

Options

Flag	Effect
(none)	Pinned versions — ComfyUI 7cb784e0, suite v5.3.0. Recommended.
--latest	Newest ComfyUI and suite instead. You are on your own for breakage.
--skip-model	Skip the 8.7 GB TTS download; it happens on first generation anyway.
--skip-normalizer	ComfyUI only. Digits then reach the TTS as digits, which it misreads.
--lock FILE	Restore an exact package set from a pip freeze lockfile.
--help	Usage summary.

Changing where things go

CONDA_ROOT=/opt/miniforge3 COMFY_ROOT=/data/comfy ./install_backend.sh

Variable	Default
CONDA_ROOT	~/miniforge3
COMFY_ROOT	~/comfy-tts-app
ENV_NAME	comfy-tts
COMFY_PORT	8189
PYTHON_VERSION	3.12

If you change COMFY_ROOT or COMFY_PORT, update the script constants too — see Configuring the script.

Exact reproduction

comfyui-requirements.lock.txt pins all 232 packages. To rebuild a byte-identical environment:

./install_backend.sh --lock comfyui-requirements.lock.txt

Regenerate it after intentional changes:

source ~/miniforge3/etc/profile.d/conda.sh && conda activate comfy-tts
pip freeze > comfyui-requirements.lock.txt

What the installer does

Useful to know when something fails midway, since each step can be repeated on its own.

1. Preflight — checks Linux, git, a downloader, GPU, disk space, ffmpeg. Only missing git or a downloader is fatal; the rest warn.
2. Miniforge → ~/miniforge3, batch mode. conda init is deliberately not run, so your .bashrc is never touched.
3. Conda env comfy-tts with Python 3.12, then a guard that refuses to continue if the wrong Python somehow ended up active.
4. PyTorch from the cu128 index, pinned to 2.11.0.
5. ComfyUI cloned and checked out at the pinned commit (detached HEAD — this is expected, not an error), then its requirements.txt installed.
6. TTS-Audio-Suite cloned, checked out at v5.3.0, then python install.py — its own resolver, which must not be replaced with a plain pip install (see requirements.md).
7. Model — bosonai/higgs-audio-v3-tts-4b into ComfyUI/models/TTS/higgs_audio_v3/.
8. Number normalizer — normalizer/setup.sh --model: its own venv with transformers>=5, the open inflection model, and the gated fine-tune if you have credentials. Failure here is reported, not fatal.
9. Launcher written to $COMFY_ROOT/start_comfyui.sh.
10. Verification — imports torch, torchaudio, transformers, safetensors, soundfile, librosa, reports CUDA availability, and prints whether the normalizer came up neural or on the fallback.

Manual install

The equivalent by hand, if you would rather not use the script:

# Miniforge, self-contained, no shell integration
wget https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge/releases/latest/download/Miniforge3-Linux-x86_64.sh
bash Miniforge3-Linux-x86_64.sh -b -p ~/miniforge3
source ~/miniforge3/etc/profile.d/conda.sh

conda create -n comfy-tts python=3.12 -y
conda activate comfy-tts

# PyTorch with the CUDA 12.8 runtime bundled
pip install torch==2.11.0 torchvision==0.26.0 torchaudio==2.11.0 \
    --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu128

# ComfyUI, pinned
mkdir -p ~/comfy-tts-app && cd ~/comfy-tts-app
git clone https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI.git
cd ComfyUI && git checkout 7cb784e0f48784bb6ed588912e186e5ee1e9ee68
pip install -r requirements.txt

# The TTS node, pinned — note install.py, NOT requirements.txt
cd custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/diodiogod/TTS-Audio-Suite.git
cd TTS-Audio-Suite && git checkout tags/v5.3.0
python install.py

The model downloads itself on first generation. To fetch it ahead of time:

from huggingface_hub import snapshot_download
snapshot_download(
    repo_id="bosonai/higgs-audio-v3-tts-4b",
    local_dir="~/comfy-tts-app/ComfyUI/models/TTS/higgs_audio_v3/higgs-audio-v3-tts-4b",
)

Running the backend

~/comfy-tts-app/start_comfyui.sh

which is just:

#!/bin/bash
source ~/miniforge3/etc/profile.d/conda.sh
conda activate comfy-tts
cd ~/comfy-tts-app/ComfyUI && python main.py --port 8189

Leave it running in its own terminal for the whole session — model load takes tens of seconds and would otherwise be repeated. The web UI at http://127.0.0.1:8189 is useful for watching progress and reading errors, but is not needed; the script drives everything over HTTP.

Configuring the script

Most settings live in settings.ini next to the script — see usage.md. The backend address in particular:

[comfy]
comfy_url = http://127.0.0.1:8189

Two paths remain constants in lektor_ai_comfy.py, because the script touches ComfyUI's own directories directly rather than over HTTP:

COMFY_OUTPUT_DIR  = Path("/home/lukas/comfy-tts-app/ComfyUI/output")
COMFY_INPUT_DIR   = Path("/home/lukas/comfy-tts-app/ComfyUI/input")

Generated audio is read straight out of the output directory and voice references are copied into the input directory, so both must be real paths reachable from wherever the script runs. If you installed ComfyUI anywhere other than ~/comfy-tts-app, edit these two lines. They are also what would have to change first to drive a ComfyUI instance on another machine.

A third path, VOICE_PROMPTS_DIR, resolves to voices/ beside the script and needs no editing as long as the project stays intact.

The script itself needs no installation. Ensure ffmpeg is present:

ffmpeg -version && ffprobe -version

If missing, and you would rather not use sudo:

conda install -n comfy-tts -c conda-forge ffmpeg

Note that this puts ffmpeg inside the conda env, so the script must then be run with that env active.

Number normalizer

install_backend.sh installs this too — its own venv, the 8 GB inflection model, and the 1.1 GB fine-tune. Nothing further is needed unless the script says otherwise.

It gets its own venv on purpose: it needs transformers >= 5, which must not be forced on the ComfyUI environment installed above. They talk over a pipe.

The one thing the installer cannot do for you is accept a licence. The fine-tune is gated, so if you have no Hugging Face credentials the script installs everything else, reports fallback only (gated model missing), and prints these three steps:

# 1. accept the terms while signed in:
#    https://huggingface.co/Folx/qwen3-0.6b-pl-text-normalization
normalizer/venv/bin/hf auth login
normalizer/setup.sh --model

HF_TOKEN=hf_... in the environment works instead of hf auth login, and the installer picks up either automatically if you set it up beforehand.

Until then the pipeline runs with num2words for times, dates and identifiers, and says so on every run. Turn the stage off entirely with numbers = no under [normalize] in settings.ini. See normalizer/README.md.

Verifying

# 1. Backend responds
curl -s http://127.0.0.1:8189/system_stats | head -c 200

# 2. GPU visible to PyTorch
source ~/miniforge3/etc/profile.d/conda.sh && conda activate comfy-tts
python -c "import torch; print(torch.__version__, torch.cuda.is_available())"
# -> 2.11.0+cu128 True

# 3. Model present
ls -la ~/comfy-tts-app/ComfyUI/models/TTS/higgs_audio_v3/higgs-audio-v3-tts-4b/model.safetensors

# 4. Number normalizer, if installed
normalizer/venv/bin/python normalizer/normalizer.py --status
# -> "mode": "model"   ("fallback" means the weights are missing)

# 5. End-to-end on 60 seconds of a real file
cd ~/Programy/lektor_ai
python3 lektor_ai_comfy.py "input/film.mkv" --embedded-subs --end 01:00

The short run is the real test — it exercises subtitle parsing, TTS, assembly and muxing, and finishes in a couple of minutes.

Uninstalling

Nothing was installed system-wide, so removal is just deleting directories:

conda env remove -n comfy-tts
rm -rf ~/comfy-tts-app
rm -rf ~/Programy/lektor_ai/normalizer/venv    # number normalizer env
rm -rf ~/Programy/lektor_ai/normalizer/model   # and its weights
rm -rf ~/miniforge3        # only if nothing else uses it