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janhq
feat: Don't place critical files in home directory (XDG)
Problem Jan places files required for its operation directly in the user home directory, which is volatile and does not respect user and platform conventions. A much better idea would be to place the folders in the standard paths for such data.
Success Criteria Jan should place its files in the following directories per-platform
- Linux --
$XDG_DATA_HOME/jan, falling back to~/.local/share/jan - OSX --
~/Library/jan - Windows --
%LOCALAPPDATA%/jan
Additionally, Jan should not create the folder ~/.npm/_cacache, or store any cache in or at least move it to the following locations:
- Linux --
$XDG_CACHE_HOME/jan, falling back to~/.cache/jan - OSX --
~/Library/Caches/jan - Windows -- No platform-specified cache folder, should be in
%LOCALAPPDATA%/jan/cache
This would help a lot for people on systems with a centrally-managed home or user directory, such as enterprise Windows and NixOS. Additionally, if an environment variable were added (for example, $JAN_HOME), it would make development a lot easier as you could programmatically make Jan load different data directories for testing.
Additional context XDG Base Directory Specification A wonderful Stack Overflow answer about this topic A useful typescript library
Given the age of this project, the best time to implement this is right now!
On this topic, considering the size of the expected usage, the data directory at least for models should be user-settable. I don't have that much space to spare on my windows boot drive!
As someone who's already downloaded the Mixtral 8x7B (26 GB) mode, I'd rather point to it on my D: drive than have to redownload it to the system drive.
Being able to point to different directories where already-downloaded models exist would be a welcomed enhancement.
We agree with all of the above. Tracking some sub issues across: #1381 #1010
Just going to comment on this, I did not expect such a positive response! Thank you for planning this feature.
Fully agree with this. I just installed Jan and my work around was to create a symlink, "mklink /D C:\users\<user>\jan D:\AI\jan"
I love symlinks on Windows!
For anyone else wanting to do this, I had to move all the files from the original location to my target folder FIRST, and then delete the original folder "jan" in my home dir, then I was able to run the mklink command to properly create the symlink.
Thank you so much for flagging this. This issue will be solved once we finish epic: Files & Links https://github.com/orgs/janhq/projects/5/views/16?pane=issue&itemId=49509878, you can check the implementation progress under the task list section. I will close this issue for now.
