question: Issue with running a GGUF model in SwarmUI / StabilityMatrix setup

[whitevamp]

So here’s the situation:
I downloaded a GGUF model and tried running it. From what I’ve since learned, the first time I ran it, the system should have displayed a popup prompting me to download the ComfyUI-GGUF node. That popup never appeared.

Instead, I got this error:

[Warning] [BackendHandler] No backends match the request! Cannot generate anything. Backends refused for the following reason(s):

• Request requires model 'flux/realDream_flux1V1GGUFQ4KM/realDream_flux1V1GGUFQ4KM.gguf' but the backend does not have that model

10:29:03.977 [Error] [BackendHandler] Backend request #1 failed: No backends match the settings of the request given! Backends refused for the following reason(s):

• Request requires model 'flux/realDream_flux1V1GGUFQ4KM/realDream_flux1V1GGUFQ4KM.gguf' but the backend does not have that model

While researching the problem, I found this documentation:
https://github.com/mcmonkeyprojects/SwarmUI/blob/master/docs/Model%20Support.md#gguf-quantized-models

That’s where I confirmed the popup should have appeared to let me download the required node, but again—it didn’t.

Here’s what I tried after that:

Opened a terminal and navigated to the ComfyUI/nodes folder.

Manually downloaded the ComfyUI-GGUF node.

Went into that directory and ran pip install -r requirements.txt to install its dependencies.

Started up SwarmUI again and attempted to run the same GGUF model.

Got the exact same error as before.

Thinking maybe the original download was corrupted, I tried downloading a completely different GGUF model and running it. Still the same error message.

My question:
What step am I missing here? Is there something else that needs to be configured so the backend actually recognizes and uses GGUF models? Or is my setup fundamentally wrong?

System details:

OS: ChaChaOS

Frontend: StabilityMatrix 2.14.3

Web interface: SwarmUI v0.9.6.5

[mcmonkey4eva]

the backend does not have that model indicates you've mixed up model folder paths.

Matrix has been known to apply weird configurations to Swarm - I recommend just installing swarm the normal way https://github.com/mcmonkeyprojects/SwarmUI?tab=readme-ov-file#installing-on-windows (it's very easy, just download the bat and run it and it installs itself), and in Server->Server Config set ModelRoot to wherever you keep your models