draw-things-cli: local media generation from command-line on your Mac
draw-things-cli is our rebooted image generation CLI: fast, scriptable, and powered by Draw Things’ custom inference stack. It is also the fastest image generation tool on macOS.
CLI is getting a new lease on life in the age of agentic AI. But for us, this release is actually long overdue.
From the beginning, we have had an internal command-line tool for running image generation. It has been invaluable for quickly debugging different parts of our pipeline.
Over time, however, as the app gained more features, it became more convenient to debug them directly inside the app. As a result, the command-line tool gradually fell out of maintenance.
Our public repository, draw-things-community, maintains our core inference stack under the GPLv3 license. We regularly build and release gRPCServerCLI for both NVIDIA platforms and macOS from this public source repository.
draw-things-cli is a reboot of that command-line tool. It is vibe-coded, which makes it straightforward to implement many of the command-line niceties you would expect: shell auto-completion, direct image output in the terminal, automatic model downloads when needed, and recommended settings from the community repository when available. Powered by Draw Things’ custom inference stack, it is also the fastest image generation tool on macOS. It is fully open-source, under GPL-v3 license.
To install draw-things-cli today, you can use Homebrew or build it from source. To install it with Homebrew:
brew install --HEAD drawthingsai/draw-things/draw-things-cli