Hello,

I will show you how to quickly and easily setup open-webui in your Linux distro.

This will allow using Ollama models (which you have already installed locally) from a web user interface (similar to ChatGPT).

Prerequisites

Python 3.11 is recommended for the project. You can try this with global Python installation but make sure the version numbers match.

If you’d like to install Python 3.11 manually, please look into pyvenv.

Installation

1. I use a “Projects“ folder to store all active projects.

$ cd /home/$USER/Projects

2. Now, we’ll create a virtual environment to isolate open-webui project. (Recommended for Arch and Arch based distros)

Note for Arch & Arch-like distro users: As of writing, Arch and Arch-like distros are shipping Python 3.13 which open-webui doesn’t support yet. (tested on v0.5.10 GitHub)

# Make a virtualenv for this project called "webui".
$ python3 -m venv webui

# In case of Pyenv
$ pyenv exec python -m venv webui

3. Install the open-webui package.

# The below commands work in both global as well as pyenv installation of Python

$ cd /home/$USER/Projects/webui
$ source bin/activate
$ pip install open-webui

This command will now install open-webui to your project This will take some time depending on your internet connection.

4. Run open-webui

$ open-webui serve

This should initialize the software and start listening for connections at http://localhost:8080.

5. Open Firefox/Chrome and go to http://localhost:8080. Provide a name, email and password to login to your instance and that’s it!!

   

   Update open-webui

1. To update open-webui to latest version, look for a notification from open-webui screen informing us there is a new version as shown below:

   

2. Now, stop all processes of open-webui locally. This step is important. In most cases, you simply need to close the terminal which is running open-webui serve.

3. Run the commands below:

$ cd /home/$USER/Projects/webui
$ source bin/activate
# Replace <version> with the version number from notification.
# In my case, it is `0.5.12`
$ pip install open-webui==<version>
# Assuming no errors, let's run the serve command now.
$ open-webui serve

4. If you do not see any errors, try visiting http://localhost:8080. In most cases, this will work out-of-the-box.

Conclusion

This blog post summarizes the steps involved in getting open-webui working on my machine. The instructions are generic enough to be used for other Linux distros.

Please leave a comment if I missed something.

You can also follow me on Mastodon for more updates.

Bye for now :)