Embedding directory does not exist or is not a directory: %s

Error message

Embedding directory does not exist or is not a directory: %s\n

What it means

A soft warning from the stablediffusion-ggml backend shim: the embeddings directory passed via the model options does not exist or is not a directory, so build_embedding_vec() returns an empty embedding list and generation proceeds without textual-inversion embeddings. It does not abort the load; the message names the offending path.

Source

Thrown at backend/go/stablediffusion-ggml/cpp/gosd.cpp:66

// Storage for LoRAs (needs to persist for the lifetime of generation params)
static std::vector<sd_lora_t> lora_vec;
// Storage for LoRA strings (needs to persist as long as lora_vec references them)
static std::vector<std::string> lora_strings;
// Storage for lora_dir path
static std::string lora_dir_path;

// Build embeddings vector from directory, similar to upstream CLI
static void build_embedding_vec(const char* embedding_dir) {
    embedding_vec.clear();
    embedding_strings.clear();

    if (!embedding_dir || strlen(embedding_dir) == 0) {
        return;
    }

    if (!std::filesystem::exists(embedding_dir) || !std::filesystem::is_directory(embedding_dir)) {
        fprintf(stderr, "Embedding directory does not exist or is not a directory: %s\n", embedding_dir);
        return;
    }

    static const std::vector<std::string> valid_ext = {".pt", ".safetensors", ".gguf"};

    for (const auto& entry : std::filesystem::directory_iterator(embedding_dir)) {
        if (!entry.is_regular_file()) {
            continue;
        }

        auto path = entry.path();
        std::string ext = path.extension().string();

        bool valid = false;
        for (const auto& e : valid_ext) {
            if (ext == e) {
                valid = true;
                break;

View on GitHub (pinned to 44413a9d06)

Solutions

Create the directory (mkdir -p) or fix the typo in the embeddings_dir option so it points at a real directory
If you do not use embeddings, remove the embeddings_dir option entirely (empty/absent is silently skipped)
Verify with ls -la <path> from the same working directory/container the backend runs in

Example fix

# before
options: "...,embeddings_dir=/model/embeddings"  # does not exist

# after
mkdir -p /model/embeddings   # or drop the option if unused

Defensive patterns

Strategy: validation

Validate before calling

// Go caller, before load
if opts.EmbeddingsDir != "" {
    info, err := os.Stat(opts.EmbeddingsDir)
    if err != nil || !info.IsDir() {
        return fmt.Errorf("embeddings dir %q missing or not a directory", opts.EmbeddingsDir)
    }
}

Prevention

Validate every configured directory path at backend startup and fail fast with the path name
Omit unused options instead of pointing them at nonexistent paths
In containers, assert required mounts exist before starting the model

When it happens

Trigger: Calling the load function with an 'embeddings_dir=<path>' option where <path> is missing, is a file rather than a directory, or is a relative path resolved against an unexpected working directory.

Common situations: Container/deployment configs pointing at /models/embeddings that was never mounted; a typo in the path; an empty-string path is silently skipped but a wrong non-empty path warns; moving a model folder without updating the config.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of mudler/LocalAI@44413a9d06 (2026-08-15). Data as JSON: /api/errors/56484fb4ca906a2c. Report an issue: GitHub.