You will need a compiler. On Windows, you should install Visual Studio with the C++ Development components. On macOS, you will need the full version of Xcode—Xcode Command Line Tools lacks certain required tools. On Linux, you will need a GCC or Clang toolchain with C++ support.
On Windows and Linux, building GPT4All with full GPU support requires the [Vulkan SDK](https://vulkan.lunarg.com/sdk/home) and the latest [CUDA Toolkit](https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads).
Linux users may install Qt via their distro's official packages instead of using the Qt installer. You need at least Qt 6.5, with support for QPdf and the Qt HTTP Server. It should be straightforward to build with just cmake and make, but you may continue to follow these instructions to build with Qt Creator.
Note the use of --recurse-submodules, which makes sure the necessary dependencies are downloaded inside the repo. This is why you cannot simply download a zip archive.
Windows users: To install git for Windows, see https://git-scm.com/downloads. Once it is installed, you should be able to shift-right click in any folder, "Open PowerShell window here" (or similar, depending on the version of Windows), and run the above command.
Open Qt Creator. Navigate to File > Open File or Project, find the "gpt4all-chat" folder inside the freshly cloned repository, and select CMakeLists.txt.
You can now expand the "Details" section next to the build kit. It is best to uncheck all but one build configuration, e.g. "Release", which will produce optimized binaries that are not useful for debugging.
Click "Configure Project", and wait for it to complete.
You do not need to make a fresh clone of the source code every time. To update it, you may open a terminal/command prompt in the repository, run `git pull`, and then `git submodule update --init --recursive`.
