* fix(distributed): stop the probe reaper from orphaning busy backends
The reconciler's liveness probe is a 1s gRPC HealthCheck, and a single
failed probe deleted the model's node_models row. A backend that is
merely busy cannot answer it: single-threaded Python backends (video and
avatar generation) block for minutes inside one request, so the reaper
was deleting registry rows for backends that were alive and mid-request.
The model then vanished from the nodes page while it was still
generating, and because the row was gone the in-flight decrement had
nothing to decrement ("DecrementInFlight: no matching row or already
zero"). Every subsequent request re-routed and re-staged the full model
from scratch.
Two guards:
- Replicas with in-flight requests are excluded in SQL. A row that is
actively serving is proof of life, and the running request is
exactly what stops the backend from answering the probe.
- Idle replicas must miss three CONSECUTIVE probes before removal, so
a transient blip cannot orphan a live replica. A successful probe
resets the streak.
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]
* fix(distributed): drop the local model stub when its last replica goes
In distributed mode every routed model leaves an in-process stub in the
frontend's ModelLoader, and DistributedModelStore.Range reports local
stubs UNION the registry rows. Every registry removal path deletes only
the DB row, so the stub outlived the replica and the model was reported
as loaded forever.
That is the "loaded on the home page, absent from every node" ghost:
/system reads the union and still sees the stub, while /api/nodes/models
reads the registry and correctly sees nothing. It never self-healed,
and both frontend replicas showed it independently.
The replica-removed chokepoint could not fix this as it stood, because
it held a SINGLE hook that the prefix cache already owned, and it was
registered only when the prefix cache was enabled. Registering a second
listener would have silently displaced the first.
- Turn replicaRemovedHook into a list (AddReplicaRemovedHook), so
independent subsystems can each register without displacing others.
- Add NewLocalStubInvalidator, which drops the local stub once no
healthy replica of the model remains anywhere in the cluster, and
wire it unconditionally in startup.
The stub is kept while another node still serves the model: the
frontend is right to consider it loaded, and each request re-routes
through SmartRouter to pick a live replica anyway.
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]
* fix(distributed): stop staging checksum sidecars back to workers
The file transfer server writes a "<file>.sha256" sidecar next to every
file it accepts. The sender walked the model directory with no filter,
so it staged those sidecars too, and the receiver duly wrote a sidecar
for each sidecar. Every staging pass multiplied the tree:
config.json -> config.json.sha256 -> config.json.sha256.sha256 -> ...
One LongCat snapshot had grown to 498 files, 466 of them chained, up to
29 levels deep, and the staged file count climbed on every pass. This
inflates each transfer and grows disk without bound on both ends.
Skip hash sidecars in stageDirectory, and mirror the skip in
countStageableFiles so the progress bar still reaches 100%. The check is
"a sidecar sitting next to a real file" rather than a blanket suffix
ban, so a model that genuinely ships a .sha256 payload with no
corresponding base file is still transferred.
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]
* fix(distributed): classify the liveness probe instead of gating on in_flight
The previous commit excluded replicas with in-flight requests from the probe
reaper. That was the wrong guard, and could invert the bug it fixed.
in_flight has no decrement guarantee: track() balances its increment with a
defer, but a frontend killed mid-request never runs it, and the load-time
reservation is released only when the first inference completes. Nothing
resets a leaked counter. Gating the reaper on it therefore meant a leaked
counter would shield a genuinely dead replica from ever being reaped.
Nor was patience alone a fix: three misses at the default interval is ~90s of
silence, while the generation that triggered this blocks for 15+ minutes.
The real conflation was in the probe itself. A gRPC HealthCheck against the
backend's serving port measures "is it idle enough to answer", not "does the
process exist", and probeLoadedModels discarded the error that tells them
apart. Because the gRPC client is lazy, the status code is decisive:
- DeadlineExceeded: transport fine, nothing serviced the RPC. Busy.
- Unavailable: nothing is listening. Gone.
ModelProber now returns a ProbeOutcome, and only ProbeUnreachable counts
toward the reap threshold. ProbeBusy clears the streak: it is evidence of
life. A blackholed network reads as busy too, deliberately, since whole-node
failure is the health monitor's job.
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]
* feat(distributed): reconcile replicas against worker-reported processes
Probing a backend's own serving port cannot distinguish "busy" from "gone"
without inferring it from an error code. The worker can answer directly: it
spawned the process, holds the handle, and its reply is not blocked by
whatever that backend is doing.
Adds a models.running request-reply subject. The worker answers out of its
in-memory process table, reporting each live process as (modelID,
replicaIndex, address) — the supervisor's process keys are `modelID#replica`,
which is isomorphic to a NodeModel row, so the reconciler can diff the two
directly.
reconcileNodeProcesses runs before the port probe and reaps rows for models
the worker is not running. Models the worker vouches for get updated_at
bumped, which takes them out of the port prober's stale set entirely: that is
what keeps a backend deep in a long generation away from the probe in the
first place, rather than relying on classifying its silence after the fact.
A worker that does not answer is skipped, not assumed empty. A messaging
failure says nothing about the processes, and assuming the worst would delete
a node's rows on a transient NATS blip; the port probe stays as the fallback
for those nodes. Rows younger than probeStaleAfter are ignored so a freshly
created row is never judged against a process table that has not caught up.
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]
* fix(distributed): stop in_flight leaking and pin replicas against eviction
A leaked in_flight counter is not cosmetic. FindLRUModel,
FindGlobalLRUModelWithZeroInFlight and the router's eviction query all require
in_flight = 0, so a replica whose counter never came back is pinned and its
VRAM is unreclaimable for the lifetime of the process.
Two halves.
The source: routing reserves in_flight = 1 at load time so a freshly loaded
replica is not evicted out from under the request that caused the load. That
reservation was released ONLY by the first inference completing, so a route
torn down before any inference ran (client disconnect, handler error, failure
between load and the backend call) stranded it. newRouteResult now wires the
reservation to a sync.Once fired by whichever comes first, the first inference
or route teardown, and replaces three copies of the old wiring.
The backstop: a sweeper for counters leaked by paths that cannot run a defer
at all, such as a frontend killed mid-request.
Identifying a leak by elapsed time alone is unsafe. IncrementInFlight stamps
last_used at request START and nothing moves it while the request runs, so a
long generation is indistinguishable from a leak by age, and resetting there
would expose a serving model to eviction. The probe supplies the missing bit:
a backend that answers a health check promptly is not inside a request,
because that is precisely what a busy one cannot do. Requiring the row to also
be idle for 30 minutes covers backends that serve in parallel and can answer
while working, since those keep last_used fresh through each new increment.
Two existing tests asserted the old behaviour ("No decrement on Release").
That assertion was the leak, so both now pin the release instead.
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>
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LocalAI is the open-source AI engine. Run any model - LLMs, vision, voice, image, video - on any hardware. No GPU required.
A small core, not a bundle. Each backend wraps a best-in-class engine (llama.cpp, vLLM, whisper.cpp, stable-diffusion, MLX...) in its own image, pulled only when a model needs it. You install nothing you don't use.
- Composable by design: backends are separate and pulled on demand, so you install only what your model needs
- Open and extensible: load any model, or build your own backend in any language against an open interface
- Drop-in API compatibility: OpenAI, Anthropic, and ElevenLabs APIs across every backend
- Any model, any modality: LLMs, vision, voice, image, and video behind one API
- Any hardware: NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Apple Silicon, Vulkan, or CPU-only
- Multi-user ready: API key auth, user quotas, role-based access
- Built-in AI agents: autonomous agents with tool use, RAG, MCP, and skills
- Privacy-first: your data never leaves your infrastructure
Created by Ettore Di Giacinto and maintained by the LocalAI team.
📖 Documentation | 💬 Discord | 💻 Quickstart | 🖼️ Models | ❓FAQ
Guided tour
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/08cbb692-57da-48f7-963d-2e7b43883c18
Click to see more!
User and auth
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/228fa9ad-81a3-4d43-bfb9-31557e14a36c
Agents
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/6270b331-e21d-4087-a540-6290006b381a
Usage metrics per user
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/cbb03379-23b4-4e3d-bd26-d152f057007f
Fine-tuning and Quantization
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/5ba4ace9-d3df-4795-b7d4-b0b404ea71ee
WebRTC
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ed88e34c-fed3-4b83-8a67-4716a9feeb7b
Quickstart
macOS
Note: The DMG is not signed by Apple. After installing, run:
sudo xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/LocalAI.app. See #6268 for details.
Containers (Docker, podman, ...)
Already ran LocalAI before? Use
docker start -i local-aito restart an existing container.
CPU only:
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 localai/localai:latest
NVIDIA GPU:
# CUDA 13
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --gpus all localai/localai:latest-gpu-nvidia-cuda-13
# CUDA 12
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --gpus all localai/localai:latest-gpu-nvidia-cuda-12
# NVIDIA Jetson ARM64 (CUDA 12, for AGX Orin and similar)
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --gpus all localai/localai:latest-nvidia-l4t-arm64
# NVIDIA Jetson ARM64 (CUDA 13, for DGX Spark)
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --gpus all localai/localai:latest-nvidia-l4t-arm64-cuda-13
AMD GPU (ROCm):
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --device=/dev/kfd --device=/dev/dri --group-add=video localai/localai:latest-gpu-hipblas
Intel GPU (oneAPI):
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --device=/dev/dri/card1 --device=/dev/dri/renderD128 localai/localai:latest-gpu-intel
Vulkan GPU:
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 localai/localai:latest-gpu-vulkan
Loading models
# From the model gallery (see available models with `local-ai models list` or at https://models.localai.io)
local-ai run llama-3.2-1b-instruct:q4_k_m
# From Huggingface
local-ai run huggingface://TheBloke/phi-2-GGUF/phi-2.Q8_0.gguf
# From the Ollama OCI registry
local-ai run ollama://gemma:2b
# From a YAML config
local-ai run https://gist.githubusercontent.com/.../phi-2.yaml
# From a standard OCI registry (e.g., Docker Hub)
local-ai run oci://localai/phi-2:latest
To test a running LocalAI server from the terminal, open an interactive chat session from another shell. Inside the prompt, /models lists installed models and /model <name> switches between them.
# Terminal 1
local-ai run llama-3.2-1b-instruct:q4_k_m
# Terminal 2
local-ai chat --model llama-3.2-1b-instruct:q4_k_m
Automatic Backend Detection: LocalAI automatically detects your GPU capabilities and downloads the appropriate backend. For advanced options, see GPU Acceleration.
For more details, see the Getting Started guide.
Latest News
- June 2026: New native biometric backends from the LocalAI team: voice-detect.cpp for speaker recognition and voice analysis (ECAPA-TDNN, WeSpeaker, ERes2Net, CAM++, wav2vec2 age/gender/emotion) and face-detect.cpp for face detection, recognition, demographics and anti-spoofing (SCRFD/ArcFace, YuNet/SFace). Both are from-scratch C++/ggml engines with no Python or onnxruntime at inference, self-contained GGUF weights, bit-exact parity with the reference, and GPU cuDNN parity, replacing the heavier Python
insightfaceandspeaker-recognitionbackends (PR #10441). - June 2026: New realtime voice assistant demo (a tiny Go client for the Realtime API with a full talk-back voice loop and tool calling), plus streaming of the realtime LLM / TTS / transcription pipeline stages and configurable WebRTC ICE candidates.
- June 2026: Big speech push: the parakeet.cpp ASR engine gains NeMo-faithful segment timestamps, a multilingual streaming Nemotron-3.5 model, dynamic batching for concurrent transcription and CUDA graphs; the new CrispASR backend adds multi-architecture ASR + TTS, and 60 Piper TTS voices across 42 languages land in the gallery (plus per-request TTS instructions and params).
- June 2026: New backends and models: locate-anything.cpp for open-vocabulary object detection via ggml, Ideogram4 image generation in stablediffusion-ggml, llama.cpp video input, and the Gemma 4 QAT family with MTP speculative-decoding pairs. Plus an interactive CLI chat mode and RAG source citations in agent responses.
- June 2026: Distributed mode hardening: prefix-cache-aware routing, a production-ready request router with auto-sized embedding/rerank batches, ds4 layer-split distributed inference, NATS JWT auth + TLS/mTLS, and resumable file uploads.
- May 2026: LocalAI 4.3.0 -
llama.cppprompt cache on by default (repeated system prompts collapse from minutes to seconds), keyless cosign signing of backend OCI images, per-API-key + per-user usage attribution, Distributed v3 with per-request replica routing. Release notes - May 2026: LocalAI 4.2.0 - LocalAI sees and hears: voice recognition, face recognition + antispoofing liveness, speaker diarization. Plus drop-in Ollama API, video generation, redesigned UI with i18n + admin-configurable branding, vLLM at feature parity with llama.cpp, and 11 new backends. Release notes
- April 2026: LocalAI 4.1.0 - LocalAI becomes a control tower: distributed cluster mode with VRAM-aware smart routing + autoscaling, multi-user platform with OIDC and API keys, per-user quotas with predictive analytics, in-UI fine-tuning with TRL (auto-export to GGUF), on-the-fly quantization backend, visual pipeline editor. Release notes
- March 2026: LocalAI 4.0.0 - native agentic orchestration with the new Agenthub community hub, full React UI rewrite with Canvas mode, MCP Apps + client-side with tool streaming, WebRTC realtime audio, MLX-distributed. Release notes
- February 2026: Realtime API for audio-to-audio with tool calling, ACE-Step 1.5 support
- January 2026: LocalAI 3.10.0 — Anthropic API support, Open Responses API, video & image generation (LTX-2), unified GPU backends, tool streaming, Moonshine, Pocket-TTS. Release notes
- December 2025: Dynamic Memory Resource reclaimer, Automatic multi-GPU model fitting (llama.cpp), Vibevoice backend
- November 2025: Import models via URL, Multiple chats and history
- October 2025: Model Context Protocol (MCP) support for agentic capabilities
- September 2025: New Launcher for macOS and Linux, extended backend support for Mac and Nvidia L4T, MLX-Audio, WAN 2.2
- August 2025: MLX, MLX-VLM, Diffusers, llama.cpp now supported on Apple Silicon
- July 2025: All backends migrated outside the main binary — lightweight, modular architecture
For older news and full release notes, see GitHub Releases and the News page.
Features
- Text generation (
llama.cpp,transformers,vllm... and more) - Text to Audio
- Audio to Text
- Image generation
- OpenAI-compatible tools API
- Realtime API (Speech-to-speech)
- Embeddings generation
- Constrained grammars
- Download models from Huggingface
- Vision API
- Object Detection
- Reranker API
- P2P Inferencing
- Distributed Mode — Horizontal scaling with PostgreSQL + NATS
- Model Context Protocol (MCP)
- Built-in Agents — Autonomous AI agents with tool use, RAG, skills, SSE streaming, and Agent Hub
- Backend Gallery — Install/remove backends on the fly via OCI images
- Voice Activity Detection (Silero-VAD)
- Integrated WebUI
Supported Backends & Acceleration
LocalAI supports 60+ backends including llama.cpp, vLLM, SGLang, transformers, whisper.cpp, diffusers, MLX, MLX-VLM, and many more. Hardware acceleration is available for NVIDIA (CUDA 12/13), AMD (ROCm), Intel (oneAPI/SYCL), Apple Silicon (Metal), Vulkan, and NVIDIA Jetson (L4T). All backends can be installed on-the-fly from the Backend Gallery.
See the full Backend & Model Compatibility Table and GPU Acceleration guide.
Backends built by us
Most backends wrap a best-in-class upstream engine. A handful of them are native C/C++/GGML engines (no Python at inference) developed and maintained by the LocalAI project itself:
| Backend | What it does |
|---|---|
| vllm.cpp | From-scratch C++20 port of vLLM for text generation: paged KV cache, continuous batching, prefix caching, safetensors + GGUF loading, engine-enforced structured output, on CPU, CUDA, Metal and Vulkan |
| parakeet.cpp | C++/GGML port of NVIDIA NeMo Parakeet ASR (tdt/ctc/rnnt/hybrid), with cache-aware streaming transcription |
| moss-transcribe.cpp | C++/GGML port of OpenMOSS MOSS-Transcribe-Diarize: joint long-form transcription, speaker diarization and timestamping in a single pass |
| moss-tts.cpp | C++/GGML port of the OpenMOSS MOSS-TTS family: text-to-speech (MOSS-TTS-Local v1.5, 48 kHz stereo) with reference-audio voice cloning, through the MOSS-Audio-Tokenizer neural codec |
| magpie-tts.cpp | C++/GGML port of NVIDIA's Magpie TTS Multilingual 357M: 22.05 kHz mono text-to-speech in 5 voices and 9+ languages, with the NanoCodec neural codec and tokenizer/G2P embedded in a single GGUF |
| ced.cpp | C++/GGML port of the CED audio-tagging models: sound-event classification (527-class AudioSet) over REST and the realtime API for live recognition |
| voice-detect.cpp | Speaker recognition and voice analysis (ECAPA-TDNN, WeSpeaker, ERes2Net, CAM++, wav2vec2 age/gender/emotion), replacing the Python speaker-recognition backend |
| voxtral-tts.c | Voxtral Realtime 4B speech-to-text in pure C |
| vibevoice.cpp | Native port of Microsoft VibeVoice for TTS (voice cloning) and long-form ASR with speaker diarization |
| rf-detr.cpp | Native RF-DETR object detection and instance segmentation |
| locate-anything.cpp | Open-vocabulary object detection and visual grounding (LocateAnything-3B) |
| depth-anything.cpp | Depth Anything 3 monocular metric depth + camera pose estimation |
| face-detect.cpp | Face detection, recognition, demographics and anti-spoofing (SCRFD/ArcFace, YuNet/SFace), replacing the Python insightface backend |
| free-splatter.cpp | Pose-free 3D reconstruction (FreeSplatter): turns a handful of plain photos into 3D Gaussians, no camera poses or GPU required |
| privacy-filter.cpp | Standalone GGML PII/NER token-classification engine powering LocalAI's PII redaction tier |
| LocalVQE | Joint acoustic echo cancellation, noise suppression, and dereverberation |
| local-store | Local-first vector database for embeddings (shipped in-tree) |
We also maintain apex-quant, a per-tensor, per-layer quantization recipe for Mixture-of-Experts models that exploits their structural sparsity to produce GGUFs matching or beating Q8_0 quality - and they run out of the box on stock llama.cpp.
Resources
- Documentation
- LLM fine-tuning guide
- Build from source
- Kubernetes installation
- Integrations & community projects
- Installation video walkthrough
- Media & blog posts
- Examples — including the realtime voice assistant demo (Go client for the Realtime API with tool calling)
Team
LocalAI is maintained by a small team of humans, together with the wider community of contributors.
- Ettore Di Giacinto — original author and project lead
- Richard Palethorpe — maintainer
A huge thank you to everyone who contributes code, reviews PRs, files issues, and helps users in Discord — LocalAI is a community-driven project and wouldn't exist without you. See the full contributors list.
Citation
If you utilize this repository, data in a downstream project, please consider citing it with:
@misc{localai,
author = {Ettore Di Giacinto},
title = {LocalAI: The free, Open source OpenAI alternative},
year = {2023},
publisher = {GitHub},
journal = {GitHub repository},
howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/go-skynet/LocalAI}},
Sponsors
Do you find LocalAI useful?
Support the project by becoming a backer or sponsor. Your logo will show up here with a link to your website.
A huge thank you to our generous sponsors who support this project covering CI expenses, and our Sponsor list:
Individual sponsors
A special thanks to individual sponsors, a full list is on GitHub and buymeacoffee. Special shout out to drikster80 for being generous. Thank you everyone!
Star history
License
LocalAI is a community-driven project created by Ettore Di Giacinto and maintained by the LocalAI team.
MIT - Author Ettore Di Giacinto mudler@localai.io
Acknowledgements
LocalAI couldn't have been built without the help of great software already available from the community. Thank you!
- llama.cpp
- https://github.com/tatsu-lab/stanford_alpaca
- https://github.com/cornelk/llama-go for the initial ideas
- https://github.com/antimatter15/alpaca.cpp
- https://github.com/EdVince/Stable-Diffusion-NCNN
- https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp
- https://github.com/rhasspy/piper
- exo for the MLX distributed auto-parallel sharding implementation
Contributors
This is a community project, a special thanks to our contributors!

