Open WebUI with Podman

Introduction

Welcome to another installment in our AI series! Today, we’re going to set up Open WebUI, a powerful, self-hosted web interface for interacting with various large language models (LLMs). This tool provides a beautiful user experience similar to ChatGPT but on your own terms. We’ll be using Podman to containerize Open WebUI, making it a breeze to manage.

Why Open WebUI?

Open WebUI acts as a central hub for your LLMs. It can connect to local models running on Ollama or LM Studio, as well as remote services like MaaS (Model as a Service). This flexibility allows you to experiment with different models and backends all from a single, consistent interface.

Step 1: Pulling the Open WebUI Image

First, we need to pull the Open WebUI container image from its public registry. Podman makes this simple and efficient.

# This command fetches the latest main version of the Open WebUI image from GitHub's container registry.
podman pull ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:main

Step 2: Running the Container

Now, let’s run the container with all the necessary configurations. We’ll map a port, set environment variables, and create a persistent volume for data.

podman run -d \
  --name open-webui \
  -p 3001:8080 \
  -e OLLAMA_BASE_URL=http://192.168.50.50:11434 \ # If you have Ollama
  -e OPENAI_API_KEY=dummykey \
  -v open-webui:/app/backend/data:z \
  --restart=always \
  ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:main

Step 3: Accessing Open WebUI

Once the container is running, you can access the web interface by navigating to your host machine’s IP address and the mapped port.

http://192.168.50.200:3001

Initial Setup

The first time you visit the page, you’ll be prompted to create a user account. After creating your account, you can log in and access the admin settings to configure your LLM connections.

Step 4: Configuring Connections

In the Open WebUI admin panel, you can add various connections to different LLM services.

• Add connections: Settings -> Admin Panel -> Conenctions http://192.168.50.200:3001/admin/settings/connections

e.g. Notice URL format

OLLAMA: http://192.168.50.50:11434 # < — From Ollama CLI
OPENAI: http://192.168.50.50:1234/v1 # < — From LMStudio

You now have a fully functional Open WebUI instance running on your server, giving you a powerful tool to manage and interact with all your LLMs in one place!