* feat(vllm): build vllm from source for Intel XPU
Upstream publishes no XPU wheels for vllm. The Intel profile was
silently picking up a non-XPU wheel that imported but errored at
engine init, and several runtime deps (pillow, charset-normalizer,
chardet) were missing on Intel -- backend.py crashed at import time
before the gRPC server came up.
Switch the Intel profile to upstream's documented from-source
procedure (docs/getting_started/installation/gpu.xpu.inc.md in
vllm-project/vllm):
- Bump portable Python to 3.12 -- vllm-xpu-kernels ships only a
cp312 wheel.
- Source /opt/intel/oneapi/setvars.sh so vllm's CMake build sees
the dpcpp/sycl compiler from the oneapi-basekit base image.
- Hide requirements-intel-after.txt during installRequirements
(it used to 'pip install vllm'); install vllm's deps from a
fresh git clone of vllm via 'uv pip install -r
requirements/xpu.txt', swap stock triton for
triton-xpu==3.7.0, then 'VLLM_TARGET_DEVICE=xpu uv pip install
--no-deps .'.
- requirements-intel.txt trimmed to LocalAI's direct deps
(accelerate / transformers / bitsandbytes); torch-xpu, vllm,
vllm_xpu_kernels and the rest come from upstream's xpu.txt
during the source build.
- requirements.txt: add pillow + charset-normalizer + chardet --
used by backend.py and missing on the Intel install profile.
- run.sh: 'set -x' so backend startup is visible in container
logs (the gRPC startup error path was previously opaque).
Also adds a one-line docs example for engine_args.attention_backend
under the vLLM section, since older XE-HPG GPUs (e.g. Arc A770)
need TRITON_ATTN to bypass the cutlass path in vllm_xpu_kernels.
Tested end-to-end on an Intel Arc A770 with Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct
via LocalAI's /v1/chat/completions.
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Claude Code]
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>
* feat(vllm): add multi-node data-parallel follower worker
vLLM v1's multi-node story is one process per node sharing a DP
coordinator over ZMQ -- the head runs the API server with
data_parallel_size > 1 and followers run `vllm serve --headless ...`
with matching topology. Today LocalAI can already configure DP on the
head via the engine_args YAML map, but there's no way to bring up the
follower nodes -- so the head sits waiting for ranks that never
handshake.
Add `local-ai p2p-worker vllm`, mirroring MLXDistributed's structural
precedent (operator-launched, static config, no NATS placement). The
worker:
- Optionally self-registers with the frontend as an agent-type node
tagged `node.role=vllm-follower` so it's visible in the admin UI
and operators can scope ordinary models away via inverse
selectors.
- Resolves the platform-specific vllm backend via the gallery's
"vllm" meta-entry (cuda*, intel-vllm, rocm-vllm, ...).
- Runs vLLM as a child process so the heartbeat goroutine survives
until vLLM exits; forwards SIGINT/SIGTERM so vLLM can clean up its
ZMQ sockets before we tear down.
- Validates --headless + --start-rank 0 is rejected (rank 0 is the
head and must serve the API).
Backend run.sh dispatches `serve` as the first arg to vllm's own CLI
instead of LocalAI's backend.py gRPC server -- the follower speaks
ZMQ directly to the head, there is no LocalAI gRPC on the follower
side. Single-node usage is unchanged.
Generalises the gallery resolution helper into findBackendPath()
shared by MLX and vLLM workers; extracts ParseNodeLabels for the
comma-separated label parsing both use.
Ships with two compose recipes (`docker-compose.vllm-multinode.yaml`
for NVIDIA, `docker-compose.vllm-multinode.intel.yaml` for Intel
XPU/xccl) plus `tests/e2e/vllm-multinode/smoke.sh`. Both vendors are
supported (NCCL for CUDA/ROCm, xccl for XPU) but mixed-vendor DP is
not -- PyTorch's process group requires every rank to use the same
collective backend, and NCCL/xccl/gloo don't interoperate.
Out of scope (deferred): SmartRouter-driven placement of follower
ranks via NATS backend.install events, follower log streaming through
/api/backend-logs, tensor-parallel across nodes, disaggregated
prefill via KVTransferConfig.
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Claude Code]
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>
* test(vllm): CPU-only end-to-end test for multi-node DP
Adds tests/e2e/vllm-multinode/, a Ginkgo + testcontainers-go suite
that brings up a head + headless follower from the locally-built
local-ai:tests image, bind-mounts the cpu-vllm backend extracted by
make extract-backend-vllm so it's seen as a system backend (no gallery
fetch, no registry server), and asserts a chat completion across both
DP ranks. New `make test-e2e-vllm-multinode` target wires the docker
build, backend extract, and ginkgo run together; BuildKit caches both
images so re-runs only rebuild what changed. Tagged Label("VLLMMultinode")
so the existing distributed suite isn't pulled along.
Two pre-existing bugs surfaced by the test:
1. extract-backend-% (Makefile) failed for every backend, because all
backend images end with `FROM scratch` and `docker create` rejects
an image with no CMD/ENTRYPOINT. Fixed by passing
--entrypoint=/run.sh -- the container is never started, only
docker-cp'd, so the path doesn't have to exist; we just need
anything that satisfies the daemon's create-time validation.
2. backend/python/vllm/run.sh's `serve` shortcut for the multi-node DP
follower exec'd ${EDIR}/venv/bin/vllm directly, but uv bakes an
absolute build-time shebang (`#!/vllm/venv/bin/python3`) that no
longer resolves once the backend is relocated to BackendsPath.
_makeVenvPortable's shebang rewriter only matches paths that
already point at ${EDIR}, so the original shebang slips through
unchanged. Fixed by exec-ing ${EDIR}/venv/bin/python with the script
as an argument -- Python ignores the script's shebang in that case.
The test fixture caps memory aggressively (max_model_len=512,
VLLM_CPU_KVCACHE_SPACE=1, TORCH_COMPILE_DISABLE=1) so two CPU engines
fit on a 32 GB box. TORCH_COMPILE_DISABLE is currently mandatory for
cpu-vllm: torch._inductor's CPU-ISA probe runs even with
enforce_eager=True and needs g++ on PATH, which the LocalAI runtime
image doesn't ship -- to be addressed in a follow-up that bundles a
toolchain in the cpu-vllm backend.
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Claude Code]
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>
* feat(vllm): bundle a g++ toolchain in the cpu-vllm backend image
torch._inductor's CPU-ISA probe (`cpu_model_runner.py:65 "Warming up
model for the compilation"`) shells out to `g++` at vllm engine
startup, regardless of `enforce_eager=True` -- the eager flag only
disables CUDA graphs, not inductor's first-batch warmup. The LocalAI
CPU runtime image (Dockerfile, unconditional apt list) does not ship
build-essential, and the cpu-vllm backend image is `FROM scratch`,
so any non-trivial inference on cpu-vllm crashes with:
torch._inductor.exc.InductorError:
InvalidCxxCompiler: No working C++ compiler found in
torch._inductor.config.cpp.cxx: (None, 'g++')
Bundling the toolchain in the CPU runtime image would bloat every
non-vllm-CPU deployment and force a single GCC version on backends
that may want clang or a different version. So this lives in the
backend, gated to BUILD_TYPE=='' (the CPU profile).
`package.sh` snapshots g++ + binutils + cc1plus + libstdc++ + libc6
(runtime + dev) + the math libs cc1plus links (libisl/libmpc/libmpfr/
libjansson) into ${BACKEND}/toolchain/, mirroring /usr/... layout. The
unversioned binaries on Debian/Ubuntu are symlink chains pointing into
multiarch packages (`g++` -> `g++-13` -> `x86_64-linux-gnu-g++-13`,
the latter in `g++-13-x86-64-linux-gnu`), so the package list resolves
both the version and the arch-triplet variant. Symlinks /lib ->
usr/lib and /lib64 -> usr/lib64 are recreated under the toolchain
root because Ubuntu's UsrMerge keeps them at /, and ld scripts
(`libc.so`, `libm.so`) hardcode `/lib/...` paths that --sysroot
re-roots into the toolchain.
The unversioned `g++`/`gcc`/`cpp` symlinks are replaced with wrapper
shell scripts that resolve their own location at runtime and pass
`--sysroot=<toolchain>` and `-B <toolchain>/usr/lib/gcc/<triplet>/<ver>/`
to the underlying versioned binary. That's how torch's bare `g++ foo.cpp
-o foo` invocation finds cc1plus (-B), system headers (--sysroot), and
the bundled libstdc++ (--sysroot, --sysroot is recursive into linker).
`run.sh` adds the toolchain bin dir to PATH and the toolchain's
shared-lib dir to LD_LIBRARY_PATH -- everything else (header search,
linker search, executable search) is encapsulated in the wrappers.
No-op for non-CPU builds, the dir doesn't exist there.
The cpu-vllm image grows by ~217 MB. Tradeoff is acceptable -- cpu-vllm
is already a niche profile (few users compared to GPU vllm) and the
alternative is a backend that crashes at first inference unless the
operator manually sets TORCH_COMPILE_DISABLE=1, which silently disables
all torch.compile optimizations.
Drops `TORCH_COMPILE_DISABLE=1` from tests/e2e/vllm-multinode -- the
smoke now exercises the real compile path through the bundled toolchain.
Test runtime is +20s for the warmup compile, still <90s end to end.
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Claude Code]
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>
* fix(vllm): scope jetson-ai-lab index to L4T-specific wheels via pyproject.toml
The L4T arm64 build resolves dependencies through pypi.jetson-ai-lab.io,
which hosts the L4T-specific torch / vllm / flash-attn wheels but also
transparently proxies the rest of PyPI through `/+f/<sha>/<filename>`
URLs. With `--extra-index-url` + `--index-strategy=unsafe-best-match`
uv would pick those proxy URLs for ordinary PyPI packages —
anthropic/openai/propcache/annotated-types — and fail when the proxy
503s. Master is hitting the same bug on its own l4t-vllm matrix entry.
Switch the l4t13 install path to a pyproject.toml that marks the
jetson-ai-lab index `explicit = true` and pins only torch, torchvision,
torchaudio, flash-attn, and vllm to it via [tool.uv.sources]. uv won't
consult the L4T mirror for anything else, so transitive deps fall back
to PyPI as the default index — no exposure to the proxy 503s.
`uv pip install -r requirements.txt` ignores [tool.uv.sources], so the
l4t13 branch in install.sh now invokes `uv pip install --requirement
pyproject.toml` directly, replacing the old requirements-l4t13*.txt
files. Other BUILD_PROFILEs continue using libbackend.sh's
installRequirements and never read pyproject.toml.
Local resolution test (x86_64, dry-run) confirms uv hits the L4T
index for torch and falls through to PyPI for everything else.
Assisted-by: claude-code:claude-opus-4-7-1m [Read] [Edit] [Bash] [Write]
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>
---------
Signed-off-by: Richard Palethorpe <io@richiejp.com>
LocalAI is the open-source AI engine. Run any model - LLMs, vision, voice, image, video - on any hardware. No GPU required.
- Drop-in API compatibility — OpenAI, Anthropic, ElevenLabs APIs
- 36+ backends — llama.cpp, vLLM, transformers, whisper, diffusers, MLX...
- 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
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
- April 2026: Voice recognition, Face recognition, identification & liveness detection, Ollama API compatibility, Video generation in stable-diffusion.ggml, Backend versioning with auto-upgrade, Pin models & load-on-demand toggle, Universal model importer, new backends: sglang, ik-llama-cpp, TurboQuant, sam.cpp, Kokoros, qwen3tts.cpp, tinygrad multimodal
- March 2026: Agent management, New React UI, WebRTC, MLX-distributed via P2P and RDMA, MCP Apps, MCP Client-side
- 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 36+ backends including llama.cpp, vLLM, 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.
Resources
- Documentation
- LLM fine-tuning guide
- Build from source
- Kubernetes installation
- Integrations & community projects
- Installation video walkthrough
- Media & blog posts
- Examples
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!
