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Build with WasmEdge Stable Diffusion Plug-in

The WasmEdge Stable Diffusion plug-in enables WebAssembly applications to run image generation and image-to-image inference workloads using the stable-diffusion.cpp backend. It supports CPU inference out of the box, with optional CUDA and Metal acceleration for GPU-backed environments.

Prerequisites​

The Stable Diffusion plug-in has no mandatory system library dependencies — the stable-diffusion.cpp source is fetched automatically via CMake's FetchContent during the build. However, for GPU-accelerated builds, the following are required:

  • CUDA (for NVIDIA GPUs): Install the CUDA Toolkit appropriate for your platform.
  • Metal (for Apple Silicon): Available by default on macOS with Xcode command-line tools installed.
  • OpenMP (optional, for multi-threaded CPU inference): Install via your system package manager.

For Ubuntu:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y build-essential
# Optional: for OpenMP support
sudo apt install -y libomp-dev

For macOS:

xcode-select --install

Build WasmEdge with the Stable Diffusion Plug-in​

To enable the WasmEdge Stable Diffusion plug-in, developers need to build WasmEdge from source with the cmake option -DWASMEDGE_PLUGIN_STABLEDIFFUSION=ON.

cd <path/to/your/wasmedge/source/folder>
cmake -GNinja -Bbuild -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DWASMEDGE_PLUGIN_STABLEDIFFUSION=ON
cmake --build build
cmake --install build

Optional: Enable CUDA Acceleration​

cmake -GNinja -Bbuild -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DWASMEDGE_PLUGIN_STABLEDIFFUSION=ON \
  -DWASMEDGE_PLUGIN_STABLEDIFFUSION_CUDA=ON
cmake --build build
cmake --install build

Optional: Enable Metal Acceleration (Apple Silicon)​

cmake -GNinja -Bbuild -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DWASMEDGE_PLUGIN_STABLEDIFFUSION=ON \
  -DWASMEDGE_PLUGIN_STABLEDIFFUSION_METAL=ON
cmake --build build
cmake --install build

Optional: Enable OpenMP​

cmake -GNinja -Bbuild -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DWASMEDGE_PLUGIN_STABLEDIFFUSION=ON \
  -DWASMEDGE_PLUGIN_STABLEDIFFUSION_OPENMP=ON
cmake --build build
cmake --install build
note

If the built wasmedge CLI tool cannot find the Stable Diffusion plug-in, you can set the WASMEDGE_PLUGIN_PATH environment variable to the plug-in installation path (such as /usr/local/lib/wasmedge/, or the built plug-in path build/plugins/wasmedge_stablediffusion/) to try to fix this issue.

Then you will have an executable wasmedge runtime under /usr/local/bin and the Stable Diffusion plug-in under /usr/local/lib/wasmedge/libwasmedgePluginWasmEdgeStableDiffusion.so after installation.

More Information​