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Daneel AI

How to Prepare for Offline

Before a long flight, a train through a tunnel, or a day somewhere with a captive-portal wifi, open Settings > Offline mode and run through the Prepare for offline panel. Each row is a check you actually need, and the Cache resources button fills in the static content in one click.

Prerequisites

Section titled “Prerequisites”
  • An active license if you use paid features. The cached token lasts 7 days, but you want a fresh refresh before you go offline for long. See How Licensing Works if you are not sure what your status is.
  • At least one vault with the documents you want to work with. If you have not built one yet, follow Build a Document Vault.
  • A local provider chosen in Settings. WebGPU works out of the box. Ollama on localhost or LAN is also a valid choice. See The Provider Spectrum if you need help deciding.

Open the panel

Section titled “Open the panel”
  1. Click the widget in the bottom-right corner of any page, then the cog icon to open Settings.
  2. Scroll the sidebar to Offline mode. The panel has two sections: Status and Prepare for offline.
  3. The Prepare section shows six rows, each with a status pill on the right.

Read each row

Section titled “Read each row”

The panel composes the report from live state every time you open it. The Refresh button in the top-right of the panel re-runs the check.

Vault content — counts every vault and the total documents + chunks. Green Ready means at least one vault has indexed documents. Red No vault means you have not created one. Amber Empty means you have a vault but nothing indexed yet.

License — reads your cached token and reports days remaining. Green Ready means more than three days left. Amber Refresh needed means three days or fewer. Red Missing means no license is activated, which is fine if you only use free features. Red Expired means the cached token is past its expiration.

Language model — counts WebGPU models in the transformers-cache Cache API bucket. Green Ready requires at least one downloaded. Red Missing means you need to download one in Settings > Models.

Embedding model — same check against the embedding catalog. This is specifically required for vault search. Without it, offline chat works but offline search does not.

Cached resources — counts entries in the daneel-resources cache bucket. Green Ready means the bucket is populated and fresh. Amber Stale means the entries exist but are older than two weeks. Red Missing means the bucket is empty.

Knowledge extraction (optional) — counts GLiNER NER models. Green Ready if at least one is downloaded. Amber Missing is acceptable if you do not need the knowledge graph while offline. If you want in-vault entity extraction without a network, this has to be green.

The final line shows your storage quota: used MB vs quota MB. Chrome extensions with unlimitedStorage permission rarely hit the quota, but it is surfaced for transparency.

Cache the static resources

Section titled “Cache the static resources”

Click Cache resources for offline. The button calls the PreCacheManager, which:

  1. Fetches the docs site’s pages.json manifest.
  2. Iterates every documentation page and writes its markdown into the daneel-resources bucket.
  3. Fetches articles.json from the news site and caches every article.
  4. Fetches the changelog and credits pages.

Each cached response carries an X-Daneel-Cached-At header with a timestamp so the panel can show you how fresh the cache is.

When it finishes, the Cached resources row flips to green and a small caption appears below the button: “Cached N resources” and a failure count if any URL did not respond.

Download missing models

Section titled “Download missing models”

Models are not downloaded by the Cache resources button. A multi-gigabyte pull is not something we do silently. If your Language model or Embedding model rows are red:

  1. Open Settings > Models (or Settings > WebGPU for the default WebGPU model).
  2. Pick a model and click Download. Granite 4.0 Micro 3B is a good all-round starting point. Bonsai 1.7B q1 is 291 MB and still supports step-by-step reasoning if you are tight on disk.
  3. Return to Settings > Offline mode and press Refresh. The row should flip green.

For the optional knowledge extraction row, see How to Build a Knowledge Graph.

Verify your setup

Section titled “Verify your setup”

The safest way to check that everything works without actually disconnecting is Test offline mode.

  1. In Settings > Offline mode, under the Mode section, flip the Test offline mode toggle (the amber one).
  2. Open a vault, run a search, ask a question. Everything should work.
  3. Try to run a chat against a remote provider like Claude. You should see an amber banner offering to switch to a local provider.
  4. Flip Test offline mode off when you are done.

Test mode persists until the service worker reloads (browser restart or extension update). Switch to offline mode persists across browser restarts.

Troubleshooting

Section titled “Troubleshooting”

The Cache resources button returned some failed URLs. Not every failure is a problem. If the docs site was briefly unreachable, the remaining URLs succeeded and you have most of what you need. Run the button again to retry.

License shows Missing but I have a paid plan. You have not activated the license in this browser. Open Settings > License and paste your key while online.

Language model row stays red after download. Open Settings > Models Storage to see what is actually cached. If your model does appear there but the Offline mode panel shows it missing, Refresh the panel. The inventory is computed via cache inspection and can lag by a few seconds after a download finishes.

Storage quota is close to full. Use Reclaim Disk from Local Models to delete large models you no longer need, but only while online. The Models Storage panel is deliberately locked while offline mode is on so an accidental delete does not break your session.

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”