* fix(advisorylock): set statement_timeout alongside lock_timeout
WithLockCtx already overrides a deployment-wide lock_timeout on its
dedicated connection so a blocking pg_advisory_lock() waits its turn
instead of failing with 55P03. statement_timeout aborts that exact same
statement independently, with SQLSTATE 57014, and was not overridden.
Production roles commonly carry statement_timeout=60s. Any guarded
section longer than that (a cold model load stages for tens of minutes)
therefore killed every concurrent waiter:
advisorylock: acquiring lock 9003261067483446873: ERROR: canceling
statement due to statement timeout (SQLSTATE 57014)
Derive it from the same context budget as lock_timeout, with a matching
RESET so the pooled connection is returned clean.
Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
* feat(distributed): add ModelLoadJob, the durable cold-load record
A cold load in distributed mode is a long-running background job, but it
was modelled as a synchronous side effect of an inference request: the
whole of it (backend install, multi-GB staging, checkpoint load) ran
inside the per-model advisory lock. Loading a 35.7 GB GGUF held that lock
for ~20 minutes, so every concurrent request for the same model blocked
on pg_advisory_lock and died at the role's 60s statement_timeout.
Introduce the row that lets the lock shrink to a decision. Exactly one
ModelLoadJob may be active per tracking key; that uniqueness — not the
lifetime of a lock — is what de-duplicates concurrent loaders across
replicas. ClaimLoadJob does its read-then-write under the advisory lock
and nothing else: no network, file or gRPC I/O inside the guarded
section, so a claim costs milliseconds no matter how long the resulting
load takes.
LastProgress is a heartbeat rather than a byte counter. A checkpoint load
legitimately moves zero bytes for many minutes, so a reaper keyed on byte
movement would reclaim a healthy job mid-load; byte progress stays the
concern of load_deadline.go. A job whose heartbeat stops for longer than
the orphan window is reclaimable, so a replica killed mid-load cannot
wedge a model permanently.
Failed jobs keep their row for a short grace so an immediately-following
request reports the real cause instead of silently starting a fresh load
of a model that just failed.
No caller yet — the router moves onto this in the next commit.
Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
* refactor(distributed): run cold loads as jobs, outside the advisory lock
Route wrapped the entire cold load — node selection, backend install,
multi-GB staging and the remote LoadModel — in the per-model advisory
lock. The lock's job is to de-duplicate concurrent loaders, a decision
that takes milliseconds; holding it for the tens of minutes the resulting
work takes is what turned a dedup mechanism into a cluster-wide outage
for that model.
Split it into a claim and a run. The claim is the only thing left inside
the lock. The run is a background job owned by the claiming replica and
bounded by the same progress-extended deadline as before; every other
request for that model — local or on another replica — attaches as a
waiter and is served the moment the model is ready, with no duplicate
load and no lock contention.
Waiters share one broadcast rather than an ordered queue: they all want
the identical outcome, so ordering them would add fairness machinery that
changes no result. The local channel wakes same-replica waiters instantly
and a 2s DB poll is the authority, because a waiter on another replica
has no channel to close. On wake a waiter re-runs the warm path rather
than trusting the signal — the model may have been evicted in between.
A waiter whose client disconnects returns immediately and the job keeps
running; it belongs to the job record, not to the request. A failure is
recorded on the row so every waiter reports the real cause, and the row
survives briefly so the next request does not read "no job" as "not
loading" and start a duplicate load of a model that just failed.
The runner heartbeats the row on a fixed interval whether or not bytes
are moving, which is what keeps a legitimately silent checkpoint load
from being reclaimed as an orphan. Phase (installing/staging/loading) and
placement ride to the heartbeat on the context, the same seam
load_deadline.go already uses, so single-host paths are untouched.
Non-distributed mode (no DB) keeps the inline load exactly as it was.
Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
* feat(distributed): bound the wait for a loading model and answer with progress
A request whose model is cold-loading now attaches to the running job and
is served the moment the model is ready. That wait has to be bounded: a
held HTTP request cannot survive real infrastructure, and an ingress or LB
idle timeout kills a twenty-minute request regardless of what LocalAI
does.
New LOCALAI_MODEL_LOAD_WAIT (default 60s) bounds the CALLER, never the
load — the job keeps running either way. On expiry the request gets 503
with Retry-After and a structured body naming the model, the node, the
phase, byte progress and an ETA. The `error` envelope keeps OpenAI
clients working; `loading` is additive so they ignore it.
The ETA comes from the job's own observed rate and is omitted rather than
guessed until enough bytes have moved for that rate to mean anything: a
confidently wrong ETA on a twenty-minute wait is worse than none.
Retry-After is that ETA when known, clamped to [5s, 300s], and the wait
budget otherwise.
LOCALAI_MODEL_LOAD_WAIT=0 waits unbounded, for deployments with no proxy
in front. Zero in the config struct still means "unset, use the default",
so the CLI records the operator's zero as ModelLoadWaitUnbounded rather
than losing the distinction.
The distributed branch of ModelLoader.loadModel wrapped the router's
error with %s, which flattened it to a string. Use %w: the typed error is
what the HTTP layer keys the 503 off.
Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
* feat(api): add GET /api/models/{id}/load-status
A client that receives 503 while a model stages onto a worker needs
somewhere to poll. This returns the same `loading` object the 503 carries
— phase, node, byte progress and ETA — or 404 when no load is running.
Read-only and observability-shaped, so it is deliberately neither
admin-gated nor feature-gated: it explains a 503 the caller just
received, and hiding that behind a per-modality feature would make the
explanation for a failed image request depend on chat permissions. It
also gets no MCP tool, since there is nothing here an admin would manage
conversationally.
Registered on the surfaces from .agents/api-endpoints-and-auth.md: the
swagger block (existing `models` tag, so /api/instructions needs no new
area), the endpoint discovery maps in RegisterLocalAIRoutes, regenerated
swagger, and the distributed-mode docs page. No FLAG_* usecase is
involved, so capabilities.js is unchanged.
Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
* feat(ui): show cold-load progress in Chat and retry when the model is ready
A chat request for a model that is still staging onto a worker now gets a
503 carrying live progress instead of an error. Render it: the composer
shows the phase (installing / staging / loading), the node, the percent
and the ETA, then polls load-status and re-sends the request the moment
the model is ready.
Reuses the staging progress idiom the page already had rather than
inventing a second one — the two sources are folded into one
loadProgress, with the load job winning because it is authoritative
across frontend replicas and knows the phase, where the staging operation
only knows about a byte transfer this replica happens to be performing.
Waiting is bounded (three send attempts, ~30 min of polling each), so a
load that never finishes still surfaces as an error rather than as a
spinner nobody questions. An aborted generation stops the polling too.
Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5 [claude-code]
* fix(distributed): check warm-path cleanup errors
The router moved legacy cleanup calls onto newly linted lines. Report
cleanup failures while preserving the fallback to a cold load.
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5 [golangci-lint]
---------
Co-authored-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Co-authored-by: localai-org-maint-bot <306269227+localai-org-maint-bot@users.noreply.github.com>
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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 work with a running LocalAI server from the terminal, start the built-in agent from another shell. It answers questions, reads your files and runs commands on your machine, asking you to approve anything that changes state. Inside a session, /models lists installed models and /model <name> switches between them. See the Terminal agent docs.
# 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 blog.
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. Also serves MiniMax-H3 joint video+audio generation |
| 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 | Mistral Voxtral-4B-TTS text-to-speech in pure C: 20 preset voices across 9 languages, 24 kHz WAV output, no dependencies beyond libc |
| 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 |
| trellis2.cpp | C++/GGML port of Microsoft TRELLIS.2: single-image to textured 3D mesh (GLB with PBR materials) |
| 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
- Blog: release write-ups, benchmarks and engineering notes
- 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!
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!

