Transform your local LLM into a beautiful, full-featured web interface — like ChatGPT, but running entirely on your machine. Open WebUI is a self-hosted web interface for Ollama. It gives you: Best of all: It connects to your local Ollama instance — no data ever leaves your machine. qwen2.5:7b )Docker is the easiest way. One command and you're done: docker run -d \
-p 3000:8080 \
-v open-webui:/app/backend/data \
-e OLLAMA_BASE_URL=http://host.docker.internal:11434 \
--name open-webui \
--restart always \
ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:main
What this does: -p 3000:8080 — makes it available at http://localhost:3000 -v open-webui:/app/backend/data — keeps your chats saved even if you restart-e OLLAMA_BASE_URL — tells it where your Ollama is running--restart always — auto-starts when your computer boots# Check logs — you should see "Application startup complete" docker logs open-webui --tail 20 Then open http://localhost:3000 in your browser. First time? Create an account. Don't worry — it's local only. Your data stays on your machine. If you don't have Docker: pip install open-webui open-webui serve Then open http://localhost:8080. After logging in, Open WebUI looks and feels like ChatGPT: Key areas: In the top dropdown, you can switch models during a conversation. Each model sees the same chat history. qwen2.5:7b for general chatdeepseek-r1:14b when you need hard reasoningcodellama
for code tasksClick the paperclip icon and upload a PDF, Word doc, or text file. The model can then answer questions about it.
Use cases:
Click the microphone icon to speak instead of type. This works in Chrome and Edge. In Settings → Model, you can adjust: Open WebUI can integrate with local image generators: docker run -d \
-p 7860:7860 \
-v sd-models:/models \
--gpus all \
asd/stable-diffusion-webui:latest
Then configure in Open WebUI Settings → Image Generation. Enable web search in Settings → Web Search. Open WebUI will search the internet when answering questions. For secure remote access (behind a VPN or tunnel): docker run -d \
-p 443:443 \
-v open-webui:/app/backend/data \
-e OLLAMA_BASE_URL=http://ollama:11434 \
-e WEBUI_SECRET_KEY=your-secret-here \
--name open-webui \
ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:main
Open WebUI supports multiple users out of the box. Each user: To add users: Go to Settings → Admin Panel → Users → Create User. Next step: Now that you have a GUI, try setting up Local RAG — let your LLM answer questions about your own documents. Part of the Local LLM Guide — the definitive resource for running AI on your own hardware.