Microsoft Foundry Local - Disconnected

This post shows you how to deploy Microsoft Foundry Local onto a disconnected machine with no access to the internet. This requires having a machine with access to the internet to stage the model and installation media and a way of getting those items to the disconnected machine.

From a machine with access to the Internet:

1. Install Foundry Local as normal.
2. Download the required model via foundry model download qwen2.5-0.5b-instruct-generic-cpu:4 substituting qwen2.5-0.5b-instruct-generic-cpu:4 for the model of your choosing. Navigate to the Foundry cache location - this is discovered via running foundry cache location and defaults to c:\users\username\.foundry\cache\models where username is the currently logged in user, Copy foundry.modelinfo.json and the vendor\model folder to the transfer media (USB key or what you’re using to move it across the airgap). At this point, you would have the json file and a folder named Microsoft in the transfer media with a model folder in the Microsoft folder (such as \Microsoft\qwen2.5-0.5b-instruct-generic-cpu-4). Download the foundry local offline installer from Releases · microsoft/Foundry-Local and copy that to the transfer media.

On the air-gapped machine

1. Install Foundry Local from the transfer media (for an x86 Windows machine, this would be within PowerShell by running Add-AppPackage -path FoundryLocal-x64-0.8.119.msix).
2. Copy the foundry.modelinfo.json file and the vendor\model folder into a new folder on the disconnected machine such as c:\users\username\Models.
3. Change the cache location via foundry cache cd c:\users\username\Models.
4. You can then run the model normally from the cache using foundry model run qwen2.5-0.5b-instruct-generic-cpu:4.