For People In A Hurry: How to Set Up Open-WebUI with Ollama as free, local and privacy-focused alternative to ChatGPT

README.md

What Is This?

This is a quick copy-paste-observe guide for people in a hurry to quickly set up Open-WebUI such that one can run and access a local Large Language Model (LLM) as a web application similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Build

1. Install Ollama using the command below:

curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh

2. Install Open-WebUI via docker using the command below:

docker run -d -p 3000:8080 --add-host=host.docker.internal:host-gateway -v open-webui:/app/backend/data --name open-webui --restart always ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:main

If you wish to utilise a Nvidia GPU, use the command below instead:

docker run -d -p 3000:8080 --gpus all --add-host=host.docker.internal:host-gateway -v open-webui:/app/backend/data --name open-webui --restart always ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:cuda

3. Download ollama LLM model by using the command below:

ollama pull <model_name>
#Eg. ollama pull qwen3:8b

Warning

Note that, if you use any models with the cloud tag, it means it would not be fully local as it would be using Ollama's cloud models.

4. Access Open-WebUI via its dashboard:

Dashboard Link: http://localhost:3000

Note

Note that you can access it from an external network device via http://<SERVER_IP_ADDR>:3000.

References

1. Ollama Installation - https://ollama.com/
2. Open-WebUI Installation - https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui