If you lookup Open WebUI¹ and Ollama² on the internet, you’ll probably get examples that are all using Docker. What about Podman? Well, here you go!

Installation

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We’re using homebrew, of course.

brew install ollama
brew install podman-desktop

I’ll not go into the details of setting up Podman Desktop³ and Ollama here because they both have pretty good online documention available (see resources at the bottom).

Configuration details

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Ollama

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By default, ollama will be listening on localhost:11434 - Make sure you start it before running the container, although, Open WebUI should pick it up afterwards anyway.

Open WebUI Container

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The container will run in rootless mode under our user. We’ll use localhost:3000 in the browser and that is the port that’ll be forwarded internally to the container port 8080 To keep the configuration data e.g. User data and settings, we’ll create a directory in our User’s $HOME.

Setup and Start

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Pick an LLM that suits your needs - I’m going with Llama 3 8B

ollama run llama3:8b

Start the podman service

podman machine start

Create the data directory

mkdir ~/podman/open-webui

Run the Open WebUI Container

podman run -d --name open-webui -p 3000:8080 --add-host localhost:127.0.0.1 -v ~/podman/open-webui:/app/backend/data ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:main

Upon accessing localhost:3000 you’ll be prompted to create an account.

Resources

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