Appendix B — Offline / air-gapped checklist

Use this when the host must not reach HuggingFace or GitHub at runtime. Detailed install recipes live in Getting started and Deployment & ops; this page is the operator checklist.

On a connected machine

• Resolve release tag: TAG=$(gh api repos/ekhodzitsky/gigastt/releases/latest -q .tag_name) (or pin v2.14.1)
• Download offline bundle for the target arch
  (gigastt-${VER}-offline-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz or aarch64)
  or deb pair: gigastt_…_amd64.deb + gigastt-model-int8_…_all.deb
• Download .sha256 (+ .minisig if you verify with minisign)
• Verify checksums (sha256sum -c) and optional docs/verifying-releases.md
• If you need speaker diarization, also fetch wespeaker_resnet34.onnx (not always in the lean offline bundle) on a connected host and copy it into the model dir later — or accept mono transcripts without labels
• If you need Silero VAD on the air-gapped host, fetch the VAD model the same way (--vad would otherwise try the network)

On the air-gapped host

• Install binary + model (installer script, dpkg -i, or unpack tarball)
• Confirm model files under ~/.gigastt/models/ (or your --model-dir)
• Run with offline guard when scripting: GIGASTT_OFFLINE=1 or global --offline so a missing file fails fast instead of hanging on DNS
• Smoke: gigastt transcribe sample.wav (no network)
• Server: gigastt serve → curl http://127.0.0.1:9876/ready
• systemd: enable unit from the bundle; bind remains loopback unless you explicitly set --bind-all / GIGASTT_ALLOW_BIND_ANY=1

Runtime rules that stay true offline

After copy-in of new model files

# No restart required if serve is already up:
curl -s -X POST http://127.0.0.1:9876/v1/admin/reload
# {"reloaded":true,"variant":"rnnt","encoder":"int8"}

See Hot-reload.

Links

• Getting started — air-gapped
• Deployment — offline install
• packaging/offline/README-OFFLINE.md
• docs/privacy.md — runtime vs build-time network