# Open WebUI: Your Local ChatGPT

> Source: <https://dev.to/lingdas1/open-webui-your-local-chatgpt-29d8>
> Published: 2026-05-23 18:55:33+00:00

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:
# Install
pip install open-webui
# Run
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.
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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:
# Add Automatic1111 (Stable Diffusion)
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):
# Using Caddy as a reverse proxy
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.