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LocalAI/docs/content
mudler's LocalAI [bot] 74b7ea2829 feat(ui): replace the gallery and inventory tables with a rail and a detail pane (#11288)
* feat(ui): rename the Install Models nav entry to Discover

"Install Models" named the action rather than the destination, and it was
the only multi-word entry in a rail of one-word ones (Home, Chat, Studio,
Talk, Build, Operate). A bare "Models" was the obvious fix but it collides
with the installed-models view under Host, which is a different page for a
different job.

"Discover" keeps the rhythm and says what the page is for. The icon moves
from a download arrow to a compass for the same reason: the page is browsed
before it is installed from.

Translated in all seven locales rather than left to fall back, so a locale
switch does not leave the entry in English.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]

* feat(ui): replace the gallery table with a rail and a detail pane

The eight-column table was not the real problem; the click-to-expand row
underneath it was. Variants, files and a VRAM estimate never fitted inside a
<tr>, so they were pushed into a drawer that could hold one model at a time,
could not be linked to, and had no room to say anything useful.

The gallery is now a rail to scan and a pane that answers. The pane has two
states and no third: with nothing selected it is the discovery page, and with
a model selected it is that model's detail. Selection lives in the URL, so a
model is linkable and Back steps out of the detail instead of off the page.

The rail groups by capability while browsing and flattens to results the
moment a term is typed. That is a rule rather than a toggle: once someone has
said what they are looking for, the buckets are between them and the answer,
and making the user choose would be handing them our problem.

The detail pane plots VRAM against context length with the host's own limit
drawn across it. This is new information, not a restyle. A single number
invites "so will it run?", and the honest answer is usually "yes, up to a 32k
context", which is a shape rather than a number. The estimates were already
fetched for every context size, so it costs no new request. Backends that
take no context length say so instead of being given a meaningless chart, and
a host with no GPU gets no chart at all rather than bars with nothing to
compare against.

The split-button variant menu goes with the actions column. The pane lists
every build with its backend, quantization, size, fit and a details
disclosure, each installable, which is what the dropdown was a cramped
substitute for. Its tests move onto that list; the three contracts it alone
carried (fetch-once caching, the loading state, an unfit build staying
installable) are backfilled against the pane.

RecommendedModels moves inside the pane, where it has the width to argue for
a model instead of listing one, and keeps its own dismissal and collapse.

Rail entries carry no description. Two lines is the budget and the second is
better spent on whether the thing will run; the stripped-Markdown contract
moves to the pane's lede, tooltip included.

e2e: 123 passing across models-gallery, navigation, recommended-panel,
model-artifact-operation, operations-strip and page-render-smoke. Inline
styles in Models.jsx drop from 82 to 41.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]

* refactor(ui): extract the split view into shared components

Discover shipped its rail, pane and detail header as private functions inside
Models.jsx. Backends and Host have the same defect and want the same shape, so
leaving them there guarantees three rails that drift.

SplitView, EntityRail, DetailHeader and StatGrid now live under
components/split/. EntityRail is deliberately data-driven: a surface maps its
own entity onto { id, name, icon, meta, stripe, groupId } and keeps its
vocabulary to itself, which is what stops the rail learning about models,
backends and loaded state all at once.

The CSS moves with it. What was .discover__rail is .entity-rail, .discover__
pane is .split-view__pane and so on, because a class named after one page is a
lie on the next two. Only what is genuinely Discover's stays behind the old
prefix: the shelves, the hero and the VRAM-by-context chart.

Two additions the shared rail needs and Discover did not: a state stripe, for
surfaces read by condition before they are read by name, and an empty label.
Discover passes neither.

No behaviour change. e2e 100 passing across models-gallery, navigation and
models-recommended-panel.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]

* feat(ui): put the backend gallery on the split view

Same defect as the model gallery, so the same shape: a seven-column table over
a click-to-expand row that was the only place the repository, licence, tags and
links could go.

The rail groups backends by the use case they serve, sharing Discover's
taxonomy on purpose: a backend is the runtime a use case needs, so "vision"
ought to mean the same thing one level down. It flattens on a query for the
same reason it does on Discover.

The zero state is the one real departure. A backend's fitness is not free
memory, it is the accelerator and platform it was built for, so the pane leads
with what this host is, then what is not installed yet, then whether anything
installed has gone stale. The table listed 37 runtimes and left "which of these
can even run here" entirely to the reader.

Distribution moves into the pane, which is the one thing a row could never
carry: which nodes hold a copy and which do not, with the install-on-more
control next to it rather than squeezed against a chip.

The distributed and target-node action logic is unchanged, including the guard
that keeps a hardware-specific build off the fan-out path. The split-button
popover loses its per-row anchoring because there are no rows; one pane, one
anchor.

Selection lives in ?backend=, preserving the ?target= scope rather than
clobbering it.

e2e: 139 passing across models-gallery, navigation, backends-management,
models-recommended-panel, nodes-per-node-backend-actions, page-render-smoke,
operations-strip and model-artifact-operation. The backends spec gains six
split-view tests; its three description-cell tests move onto the pane lede.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]

* feat(ui): put the Host inventory on the split view

The last of the three surfaces, and the one that is not a catalog. Both tabs
had the same click-to-expand row, so the shell transfers; what does not
transfer is the zero state, because there is nothing to discover in your own
inventory.

With nothing selected the pane reports what is happening: how many models are
loaded, what failed, what has an update, and which models are holding VRAM
right now. Every number was already on the page. None of them had been
assembled into one statement, so "what is going on" was a question the tabs
could not answer however long you looked at them.

The rail buckets by state rather than capability - Running, Idle, Disabled for
models; Update available, Installed for backends - which is the opposite of the
galleries and deliberately so: nobody opens Host wondering which of their
models does vision. Entries carry a state stripe for the same reason.

Load and Stop are promoted out of the kebab, because that is what an operator
came for; the rest stays behind the menu rather than diluting it. Adopted,
pinned and alias badges follow the model into the pane: they are facts about
the thing, not about its state, and the rail line is spent on state.

Deliberately NOT done: folding the two tabs into one rail, as the mock had it.
It costs five URL parameters, the manage-tab localStorage key and the
stat-card shortcuts, all of which are live deep-links today. The tabs stay as
the group selector; merging them is a follow-up with its own migration.

e2e: full suite 355 passing. New host-split-view spec; alias-template,
manage-logs-link, manage-action-menu-position and model-editor-back-nav move
off `.table` and the row kebab onto the rail and the pane.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]

* polish(ui): accessibility and consistency pass over the three split views

Findings from a pass over what the previous four commits actually shipped,
rather than what they were supposed to.

The rail was not a listbox. ARIA lets a listbox contain options and groups,
and nothing else, but each group's collapse control is a button that has to
sit inside the scroller with the entries it folds. It is now a labelled group
of buttons, which is the honest description; selection is announced with
aria-current and the arrow keys are unaffected.

Every entry was its own tab stop, so tabbing past a forty-entry rail to reach
the pane took forty keystrokes. Roving tabindex makes the rail one stop, and
arrowing now moves focus with the selection instead of leaving it behind on an
entry Tab can no longer reach.

The rail rounds its corners with overflow:hidden, which was clipping the focus
ring off the first and last entries entirely. Inset outlines fix it.

A 30px row is fine under a mouse and too small under a thumb, so coarse
pointers get a 44px target without costing density on a desktop.

One slot said three different things: "9 models loaded" on Discover, "12
loaded" on Backends, "3 of 9" on Host. All three lists are a page of a larger
set, so all three now say so the same way.

Also removed: an emptyLabel prop on EntityRail that nothing passed, its dead
CSS rule, and MODELS_COLSPAN and ResourceRowDesc, which died with the tables.

e2e: full suite 355 passing.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]

* fix(ui): correct three defects only a real gallery exposed

Running the branch against a live instance with 1,595 models and 1,017
backends, rather than against mocked fixtures, surfaced three things the e2e
suite could not.

Grouping did nothing. The rails matched on the use-case keys the filter chips
send (`chat`, `tts`, `transcript`), but those are a server-side vocabulary the
handler maps onto entries. What entries actually carry is free-form and
inconsistent: models come back tagged `llm`, `gguf`, `vision`, `coding`, and
backends `LLM`, `text-to-text`, `audio-transcription`. Nothing matched, so
every model landed in "Everything else" and the feature was decorative.

Grouping now lives in utils/entityGroups.js, shared by both galleries, matching
case-insensitively against the vocabulary the API really uses, with the entry's
backend as a fallback signal - a backend named `whisper` is a speech backend
whatever its tags say. Order is specific before general and that is
load-bearing: a vision model is tagged `llm` too, so testing text first would
swallow it.

The zero state claimed GPU memory on a machine with no GPU. The resources
endpoint reports system RAM in the same field when gpu_count is 0, so the hero
read "84.4 GB of GPU memory" next to the recommendations panel correctly
saying "No GPU detected". The number was never wrong, only its label; it now
says system memory unless a GPU is actually present.

The page title still said "Install Models" under a nav entry saying Discover.

Also: the keyboard test named the model it expected to arrive at, which made it
a hostage of the grouping table and broke the moment the buckets were fixed. It
now asserts that the selection moves and returns.

e2e: full suite 355 passing.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]

* fix(ui): the filters and the rail were fighting over the same job

Four things you find odd on Discover, and they turn out to be one mistake seen
from four sides.

The rail grouped the current page. The listing is paginated at nine rows, so
those bucket headers described nine entries out of 1,595, and turning a page
reshuffled the sections under the reader. The structure was never stable
because it was computed over the wrong set.

The chips were redundant for the same reason, seen from the other side. They
send tag= and filter all 1,595 server-side. The rail grouped nine of them
client-side by the same axis. Two controls for one job, and the weaker one was
the one this branch added, so it goes. Grouping stays only on Host, where the
list is complete, local, and bucketed by state rather than capability.

The search bar felt odd because it sat in a full-width band while the thing it
narrowed was a 290px rail below and to the left. The whole band now lives in
the rail column: search, backend, use cases, refinements, then the list it
narrows. One column to say what you want, one to show what you got. Nineteen
chips do not fit at that width, so they fold into a disclosure that states the
selection. A disclosure and not a popover, deliberately: picking use cases is
multi-select and interleaves with the backend select and the toggles below,
and a popover dismisses itself the moment you touch either.

The header held two counts and two buttons at arm's length from all of it. The
counts were the third statement of the same number on one screen, after the
rail's "9 of 1,247" and the pane's own headline, so they go. The buttons move
into the pane's zero state, which is the surface that answers "what do I do
here".

Also: the two first-run empty states wore .loading-center, which is
display:flex in the default row direction because it exists to centre one
spinner. With four children that put the icon, the heading, the sentence and
the buttons on a single line with no gap. They are now a proper full-height
empty state.

e2e: full suite 353 passing. Grouping tests are replaced by ones asserting the
rail stays flat; chip tests open the disclosure first; two filter-layout tests
that asserted the old three-band arrangement now assert the column.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]

* polish(ui): make Discover a full-height view, group the chips, name the refinements

Four things, all of them the same complaint: the page read as a document with
controls scattered on it rather than as one view.

The header is fused. A title block with its own padding, a subtitle and two
counts made the split view look like an attachment to a document that happened
to sit below it. It is now a slim bar carrying the title, the count and the two
page-level actions, and the split fills the rest of the window. Rail and pane
scroll independently, so the filters and the pane's headline stay put while a
long list moves under them.

The chips group. Nineteen in a flat row is a lot to scan even behind a
disclosure, and they already belong to the four families the rest of the UI
speaks, so they are bucketed by those. "All" sits on its own above them without
a heading, because it is a reset rather than a use case.

The refinements stop looking dumped. When the band became a column they were
three controls left where they landed; they now read as a named section with
one control per row.

The zero state suggests again. It had decayed into a "Browsing / 9 of 1,247 /
select a model" line that restated the count for the third time on one screen.
It now offers the four use cases as tiles that set the filter, which is the
shelf idea from the mock without inventing curation or paying for a second
fetch.

Two bugs found by looking at it rather than at the tests: the disclosure was
clamped to 190px, which cut it off partway through its third section so two of
the five never appeared at all; and the creation actions rendered twice, once
in the new bar and once in the pane hero a few pixels away.

e2e: full suite 353 passing. The chip-row test now holds its contract across
the per-family rows rather than a single one, and additionally asserts every
family is present and non-empty.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]

* fix(ui): pin the split view's height so a long detail scrolls the pane

Selecting a model with a long description grew the whole page and dragged the
rail down with it, which is the opposite of what "full height" was supposed to
buy.

The flex chain was right and the ceiling was missing. .app-layout and
.main-content are min-height:100dvh, which is a floor: flex distributes free
space but nothing caps growth, so a pane taller than the viewport expanded the
column, the document scrolled, and the rail stretched to match. height:100% on
the pane then resolved against an auto-height parent and did nothing.

The chat route already solves this by pinning .main-content to 100dvh. The
same treatment now applies to any route containing a .page--app, selected with
:has() so the shell does not have to learn which pages happen to be split
views. Below the stacking breakpoint the pin is lifted, because two stacked
halves in two short scrollers is worse than a page that scrolls.

Measured on a live instance: document height stays at the viewport across
selection (950px either side) and the pane overflows internally instead.

Adds discover-height.spec.js, which asserts the page height and the rail height
are unchanged by selection and that the pane is the thing that scrolls. The
existing specs could not have caught this: they mock short descriptions, and
the bug only appears when the pane has more content than the viewport holds.

e2e: full suite 355 passing.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]

* feat(ui): give Backends and Host the full-height view, and fix the Update button

Backends now matches Discover: the header fuses into a slim bar carrying the
title, the count and the page-level actions, the filters move into the rail
column where they narrow the rail and nothing else, and the split fills the
window. Its seven chips fit at rail width, so unlike Discover's nineteen they
need no disclosure. Host gets the bar and the height; its resource monitor,
summary cards and tabs stay above the split, because those are read once while
the rail and the pane are worked in.

Two things the height change surfaced.

The console layout is a flex row with align-items:flex-start, so its body sizes
to content. Right for the pages it was built for, wrong for a split view, which
needs a ceiling to scroll inside: without it the Backends rail ran past the
viewport and over the footer. Pinned with :has() so only split-view routes are
affected.

The filters vanished when nothing matched. Both galleries swapped the whole
shell for an empty state, which took the search box and the chips with it, so
the page said "try adjusting your search or filters" while offering neither.
The shell now stays and the empty state moves into the pane.

Also fixes the Update control on Host, which had no className at all and
rendered as bare text, next to a status span that had picked up btn classes and
two copies of `fas` and so rendered as a button you cannot press. They have
swapped appearances back.

e2e: full suite 355 passing. The render-smoke selector learns .view-bar__title,
since the pages it checks no longer all use PageHeader.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]

* fix(ui): keep the view mounted while searching, and bring rail grouping back

Searching replaced the whole view with a loader. The search box lives in the
rail column, so every debounced refetch unmounted the field being typed into
and dropped its focus with it. The list, the filters and the pane went too.

The shell now stays and the rail says it is busy: a sweep bar under its header
and the stale list dimmed, so the eye knows the answer is being replaced
without losing its place. A cold start still gets the skeleton, because there
is nothing to keep.

The condition for that is "nothing has loaded yet", not "the list is empty".
Those differ exactly when someone is editing a query that matched nothing, and
getting it wrong there would unmount the view on the keystroke after a
no-results search - the worst possible moment.

Grouping comes back on both galleries. It was removed because nine rows could
not fill five buckets, so a page turn rebuilt the rail's whole structure. That
was a symptom of the page size rather than of grouping: the rail now asks for
30 rows instead of 9 (Backends 60 instead of 21), which is enough for the
sections to read as structure and turns five times fewer pages. The order of
the sections is fixed, so what changes between pages is membership, not
arrangement.

Grouped while browsing, flat while searching, as before: once a term is typed
the buckets stand between the reader and the answer.

Also gives GalleryLoader a class and a testid instead of six inline style
declarations on a bare div, which is why nothing could select it.

e2e: full suite 359 passing, including a new spec asserting the search box
keeps its focus and its value across a refetch, and that a cold start still
shows the skeleton.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]

* perf(gallery): stop invalidating the VRAM estimate caches on every request

Searching or turning a page felt slow. It was not the search and not the
listing: /api/models answers in 3-9ms. It was the VRAM estimate, which the
gallery asks for once per row, and which took ~2.3s every single time however
often the same model was asked about.

pkg/vram already caches what makes that expensive - the remote content-length
probes, the GGUF metadata reads and the HF repo sizes. Those caches key on a
gallery generation counter, and AvailableGalleryModelsCached triggered a
background refresh on every call, with each refresh bumping the counter. One
page view is one listing request plus thirty estimate requests, each of which
re-read the gallery and started another refresh, so the generation moved
constantly and every cache entry was stale before it could ever be read. The
caches were dead in production.

Three changes, each doing one thing:

A refresh interval. The cached list is still served immediately; this only
decides how often re-fetching from upstream is worth starting. Five minutes,
as a package variable so tests can drive it without waiting.

A generation bump only when the gallery actually changed. An unchanged gallery
re-fetched on schedule must not throw away work that is still valid, which is
the difference between an estimate costing nothing and costing a network round
trip.

A separate "loaded" flag. The cache engaged on `cached != nil`, so a gallery
that legitimately holds nothing read as never-loaded and took the blocking path
on every call, bumping the generation each time. Found by the test for the
interval, which could not pass while this was true.

Measured against a live instance with 1,595 models:

  one estimate, repeated     2.3s  -> 2ms
  a page of 30, in parallel  10s   -> 0.04s

A first, genuinely unseen model still costs its remote probe. That is inherent;
what changed is that it is now paid once per model per gallery version rather
than once per request.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]

* perf(gallery): warm VRAM estimates at startup, and stop the UI waiting on them

Two halves of the same complaint: the gallery stalls on VRAM estimation.

Server side, the estimates are now warmed in the background at startup.
Estimating an entry nobody has asked about costs a remote probe of its weight
files, and the gallery needs one per row, so the first visitor was paying for
the whole page. The warm-up walks the gallery in the order the UI lists it, so
the first page is ready before anyone reaches it.

It is bounded and it never blocks: 300 entries at 4 at a time by default, on
its own goroutine, stopping with the server's context. Warming the whole
gallery would be thousands of probes on every boot, which is rude to the
upstream and slow to finish; warming nothing leaves the first page paying two
seconds a row. Anything past the limit still warms itself on first view.
LOCALAI_VRAM_WARM_LIMIT=0 turns it off for an air-gapped host,
LOCALAI_VRAM_WARM_CONCURRENCY=1 slows it for a metered link.

Client side, the page no longer waits on estimates it does not need yet. It
fired one request per row at once; a browser allows about six connections per
host, so thirty estimates took every slot and the request behind a click - the
variant list, an install - queued behind work nobody asked for. That is the
freeze: the list was already usable, and the UI was busy fetching sizes. Four
at a time leaves room for the interactive request to overtake, and a row whose
estimate is still in flight says "sizing…" rather than leaving a blank where a
number will appear.

buildEstimateInput moves to core/gallery as EstimateInput, since the handler
and the warmer both need it.

Measured against 1,595 models, from a cold boot:

  page 1, 30 estimates in parallel   10s -> 0.04s
  full warm-up (299 of 300 entries)  3m, in the background

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]

* chore: untrack data/.local_user_id and ignore the runtime data dir

`local-ai run` writes its instance state under ./data when started from the
repo root, which is exactly what a contributor testing a build does. The
identity file ended up committed on this branch by a `git add -A` while
verifying the gallery changes against a live instance.

Anchored, so it matches the runtime directory at the repo root and not a
`data` directory nested inside some package.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]

---------

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Co-authored-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-08-02 19:28:36 +02:00
..