Setup

Prerequisite CLI tools

For this deep dive you need the ilab CLI tool installed. It handles the main tuning workflow. Currently, it supports Linux systems and Apple/Silicon Macs (M1/M2/M3), as well as Windows with WSL2.

The installation instructions are different depending on your operative system and/or if you want to use ilab with or without GPU.

Moreover, you install InstructLab CLI using Python (as it is the easiest way), and you might use tools like pyenv to isolate the installation.

For this reason, we recommend you take a look at Installing ilab and install ilab in the more convenient.

At this time you need to use Python 3.10 or 3.11, not any other Python version is supported.

The following snippet shows the installation in a Apple Mac:

mkdir instructlab && cd instructlab

python3 -m venv --upgrade-deps venv
source venv/bin/activate

pip cache remove llama_cpp_python

pip install 'instructlab[mps]==0.19.3'

To check if ilab is installed correctly run the following command:

ilab --version

ilab, version 0.19.3

You should see the ilab version printed, at this time version 0.19.3.