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* chore(deps): bump cogito to v0.11 ahead of the nib harness nib is the agent harness that becomes 'local-ai chat'. It requires cogito v0.11, so pull that bump forward on its own: minimal version selection would apply it to LocalAI anyway, and both repos use cogito and cogito/clients. Landing it separately keeps the harness change reviewable. nib itself is not pinned yet. Nothing in LocalAI imports it, and 'go mod tidy' runs as a goreleaser before-hook in CI, so an unimported require line does not survive. It lands with its first importer. No LocalAI call site needed a change. Both cogito.WithMaxAttempts callers guard the argument above zero, so v0.11's new clamp is unreachable, and LocalAI's Multimedia values implement only URL(), so v0.11's new TypedMultimedia routing treats them as images exactly as v0.10 did. Binary size (cmd/local-ai): 200,301,381 -> 200,336,045 bytes (+34,664). A throwaway probe that links nib measured 201,042,243 bytes (+740,862 over the pre-change baseline). Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * feat(chat): resolve and seed the agent state directory Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * fix(chat): write the agent config atomically and tighten its modes Replacing config.yaml in place truncated it first, so an interrupted write would have destroyed the api_key nib keeps in the same file. Stage through a sibling temp file and rename over the target instead, and match nib's 0700 directory mode. Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * feat(chat): probe the endpoint and classify failures Probe lists what a LocalAI endpoint advertises and separates the two failures that need different advice: nothing listening, and rejected credentials. go-openai reports a rejected key as one of two concrete types depending on the error body, and both occur against a real LocalAI. The normal error handler sends an OpenAI error envelope, which arrives as *openai.APIError; the opaque-errors handler replies with a bare status and no body, which arrives as *openai.RequestError. Classifying on only one of them misses half the cases, so the status is read from either. A cancelled probe is not reported as an unreachable server, because it learned nothing about the endpoint, and neither is a reply that could not be parsed, because something did answer. Both would otherwise send the user off to start a server that may already be running. The model list is returned verbatim and in server order. LocalAI lists whatever it finds in the models directory, including stray archives and dotfiles, and deciding which advertised ids are real belongs to whoever presents them. Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * feat(chat): resolve the model from flag, config, or the server Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * test(chat): pin that model resolution sorts a copy of the caller's slice The sort spec asserted only on what the chooser was offered, so replacing the defensive copy with an in-place sort of req.Available still passed all 37 specs. Assert the input slice's order after the call, so the guarantee cannot be dropped silently by a later refactor. Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * feat(chat): offer to start a server when none is reachable Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * fix(chat): bound the server wait and pin readiness and stop semantics Set cmd.WaitDelay so a backend subprocess holding the child's stderr pipe cannot block cmd.Wait forever, which would leave exited unclosed, burn the whole shutdown grace on a clean exit, and leak the waiter goroutine. Two test gaps closed alongside it: the readiness spec now counts polls, so treating 503 as ready is observable, and Stop's single-interrupt contract is pinned by giving StartedServer interrupt/kill hooks that a spec can count. Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * refactor(chat): drive Stop through one process interface, hide exec plumbing Two independent interrupt/kill func fields plus a nil check admitted wirings no test could distinguish: the pair swapped, so a SIGKILL would strand the backends SIGINT exists to let local-ai run clean up, or kill left nil, so a wedged server never escalates. One two-method interface that *os.Process already satisfies leaves nothing to swap and nothing to nil. Also translate exec.ErrWaitDelay, whose text names an os/exec struct field, into what the user can act on. os/exec only substitutes that sentinel when the process exited without an error of its own, so no exit status is swallowed. Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * feat(chat): replace the REPL with the built-in agent local-ai chat is now the nib agent harness compiled into the binary: tool use behind an approval gate, sub-agents, MCP, plugins, and skills, all auto-configured against the local server. The REPL goes with it. Its model listing and its 401 classifier were duplicates of the ones Probe now owns, and the classifier was the version that misreads a bare 401 with no OpenAI error envelope, so keeping either would leave the package with two divergent answers to the same question. github.com/mudler/nib lands in go.mod in this commit rather than earlier: go mod tidy runs as a goreleaser before-hook on every PR, so a require line with no importer is stripped before it reaches CI. Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * refactor(chat): split the pre-agent phase out of Run and pin it Everything before the handoff is testable and nothing after it is: once app.Run owns the terminal there is no seam left. prepare draws that line, takes interactivity as a parameter so the prompts can be driven over a pipe, and hands Run the state dir, the model, and any server it started. The questions move onto one prompter that owns its buffered reader. A fresh bufio.Reader per question reads ahead and discards what it buffered, so the model choice typed behind an answer to "start a server?" was lost and the next question saw EOF. choose answers with a list index and refuses an empty offer, so a value that was never on the list cannot reach ResolveModel, which persists it and starts every later run against it. Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * fix(chat): bound each server check with a deadline Nothing bounded the model listing, so pointing chat at an address that accepts the connection and then never replies left the user with no output and no offer to start a server. The budget is context.WithTimeout rather than a cancel plus a timer. Probe deliberately refuses to call an endpoint unreachable on a context.Canceled, since a caller who gave up learned nothing about the server, and only honours a deadline. A cancel-based budget therefore expires as the one error that suppresses ErrUnreachable, exactly for the hung servers the offer exists to rescue. Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * fix(chat): tell the user when their model choice cannot be saved The choice is meant to be asked for once. When saving it fails the user is silently asked again on the next run, and the only trace was an xlog.Warn: the agent runs at log level error, and a --log-level=error run swallows it entirely. ModelRequest gains Notify for exactly this class of problem, one that is worth telling the user about but not worth failing over, and the chat wiring points it at the same writer the question was asked on. Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * fix(chat): stop a session's server when the process is signalled A server started for the session is stopped by a deferred call, and a signal skips deferred calls: a SIGTERM between the spawn and the exit left 'local-ai run' reparented to init with nothing left that knew to shut it down. Ctrl+C was already safe, but only incidentally, because the child shares this process' foreground process group. A signal handler rather than Pdeathsig on the child. Pdeathsig is Linux-only and, in Go, is delivered when the OS thread that forked exits rather than when the process does, so it can fire on a healthy parent. Setpgid would break the Ctrl+C that works today by taking the child out of the foreground group. SIGHUP joins SIGINT and SIGTERM: a terminal program whose terminal is gone has nobody left to talk to. The same context is what cancels the agent, which nib leaves to its embedder. Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * fix(chat): only skip the server checks for work that stays local Two argument shapes were classified wrongly. Every 'mcp ...' invocation counted as management, so 'local-ai chat mcp --stdio', which serves the agent over MCP and needs a model like any other session, was handed an empty one. And --init, whose shell snippet a user pastes into an rc file long before any server exists, went the other way: it demanded a running server to print a static string. The mcp split is asked of nib's own IsMCPManageSubcommand rather than restated here, so a verb added upstream cannot drift out of this list. Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * fix(chat): exit with the agent's status instead of reporting it twice nib writes what went wrong to stderr and returns nothing but an exit code, so returning that error unchanged had main log "Error running the application error=exit status 1" underneath the message the user had just read. The refusal to render the full-screen interface into a pipe is the one they meet in practice: it names --cli, and burying that hides the fix. ExitCodeError says "already reported, exit with this status". main honours it and prints nothing more, so a piped or redirected chat still fails a script the way it should. Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * style(chat): route interactive chatter through one writer helper The prompts and notices all write to a terminal, where a failed write is not worth failing the session over and the read that follows the question reports the real problem. say says that once instead of five discarded error returns. The command's one-line help comes along: chat is no longer "an interactive chat session". Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * docs(chat): record why the agent gets this process' streams Injecting them is what makes nib refuse to draw its full-screen interface into a pipe and name --cli, instead of rendering onto a terminal the caller may not own. The tradeoff is worth stating where the wiring is. Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * fix(chat): stop the session's server on cancellation, not on the way out The deferred Stop is reached only if the agent returns, and cancelling the context does not make it: nib hands the TUI to bubbletea without the context, so what actually unwinds a running session today is bubbletea's own SIGINT and SIGTERM handler. SIGHUP has no such backstop, and registering for it removed the default disposition that used to end the process outright, so kill -HUP left a live TUI with a cancelled context and the started server still running. runSession watches the context alongside the agent and stops the server the moment it is cancelled, so the guarantee no longer depends on what the agent does with cancellation. Stop is idempotent, so the deferred call stays correct and free. The doc comment on shutdownContext described the mechanism it was supposed to work by rather than the one that does. Corrected, bubbletea's handler included. ResolveModel now checks the chooser's answer against what it offered. The shipped chooser answers by list index and cannot be wrong, but ModelChooser is exported, the answer is persisted, and every later run starts against it, so the invariant belongs at the consumer. Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * chore(chat): bump nib to v0.5.1 v0.5.1 carries four fixes that matter to 'local-ai chat': - --init now names the embedder's command, so the emitted widget invokes 'local-ai chat' rather than a bare 'nib' the user does not have. - A piped CLI session that succeeds exits 0 instead of failing with EOF. - EOF at a tool-approval prompt denies the call rather than approving it, and the session exits 3 (app.ExitCodeApprovalNoInput) so a script can tell "answered" from "refused to act" without reading stdout. Read-only tools are unaffected and still run. ExitStatus already unwraps app.ExitError, so the code propagates with no change here. - RunTUI passes the context to bubbletea and gives up bubbletea's own signal handler, which makes shutdownContext the single owner of the signal and stops a SIGHUP leaving a wedged TUI behind. Verified against a live server on 127.0.0.1:8080: the three --init shells, a piped prompt exiting 0, a denied 'touch' that left no file and exited 3, a read-only 'ls' that still ran and exited 0, and a SIGHUP that unwound a TUI running under a pty. Two comment blocks in run.go described the old TUI behavior and are now wrong, so they are corrected in the same change. No behavior change: both shutdownContext and runSession are untouched, and stopping the server on cancellation is still worth keeping independent of how promptly nib unwinds. One known gap, not addressed here. The widget --init now emits runs 'output=$(local-ai chat --height 50%)', and runAgent injects Stdout unconditionally, so under $(...) nib refuses the TUI for a non-terminal stream. This is the cost the runAgent comment already anticipated, now that the snippets no longer hardcode standalone nib. Ctrl+Space should not be documented until that is decided. Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * fix(chat): let nib own stdout, so the Ctrl+Space widget works The widget 'local-ai chat --init' emits runs 'output=$(local-ai chat --height 50%)', which puts a pipe on stdout by construction. runAgent injected os.Stdout unconditionally, and nib refuses every mode but --cli when a stream it was handed is not a terminal, so Ctrl+Space printed "Re-run with --cli to use the injected streams" and inserted nothing. Verified against a pty before and after. nib reads a nil stream as "not injected" and falls back to the process stream, which is how an embedder asks for nib's own behavior. That is what stdout needs: the interface renders on /dev/tty but writes the chosen command to stdout even when stdout is a pipe, and that write is the whole of the shell-capture idiom. Stdin is deliberately left injected. A piped or redirected stdin really is ignored by the interface, so the refusal is the honest answer there, and it is the one users meet: 'echo q | local-ai chat' still says to re-run with --cli, once, exit 1. Nilling stdin the way stdout is nilled would delete that silently. Stderr is not gated by nib at all and is unchanged. One case does change and cannot be kept: 'local-ai chat > out.txt' from a terminal no longer refuses, because it is indistinguishable from the widget. It renders on /dev/tty and writes the capture line to the file, which is what standalone nib does. The app.Options literal moves into agentOptions so the decision is reachable from a spec rather than being a detail of a function that takes the terminal. Both sides of the asymmetry are pinned: reinstating 'Stdout: opts.Out' fails "hands nib nothing for the process stdout", and nilling stdin fails "hands the process stdin over". Also rewrites the last comments describing the pre-v0.5.1 behavior. Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * docs(chat): say what the stream refusal actually keys on Two comments still called it the refusal to render the interface "into a pipe". That was true when both stdin and stdout were injected, but a pipe on stdout no longer refuses, so the wording now points at precisely the case that was un-refused to make Ctrl+Space work. Only a stdin that cannot be read triggers it, and both comments now say so and name the command a user meets it with, 'echo q | local-ai chat'. The agentOptions doc also said a "file a caller chose" stays injected and refused, which reads as though 'local-ai chat > out.txt' still refuses. It does not: a shell redirect arrives as os.Stdout and is nil-ed like the widget's pipe, because the two differ only in being a regular file rather than a FIFO and nib's gate does not look at that. What stays injected is a writer an in-process caller chose for itself. Says that now, in the doc and in the spec comment that had the same ambiguity. Comments only. No behavior change. Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * docs: local-ai chat is now the built-in terminal agent `local-ai chat` was a plain chat prompt and is now an agent that runs shell commands behind an approval gate, so the pages that described a REPL were wrong rather than merely thin. Adds a Terminal agent feature page at /features/terminal-agent covering the approval gate, piped runs and their exit codes, Ctrl+Space, model resolution, state directory, and the pass-through management commands (including the `--yes` caveat that leaves a plugin installed but disabled in a script). The three-way "looking for something else" notice becomes four-way and moves into an agentic-routing shortcode. Four hand-kept copies of the same paragraph is what produced the drift the new page would otherwise have added to; the shortcode takes `current=` so each page still marks itself, and errors the build on a name that is not one of the four. Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * website: the agent is in the binary, not a second install The nib section sold a separate tool you also install, with a GitHub link as the only way in, which is now the wrong order: the agent ships compiled into local-ai, and the standalone binary is the second reason to care rather than the first. Leads with `local-ai chat`, keeps nib as the SSH-anywhere story, and adds a docs CTA pointing at the new Terminal agent page. id="nib" is left alone because localai.io/#nib is linked from outside. The two credits on the demo clip named nib as the thing that drove the machine; they now credit the agent in LocalAI, which is the same agent. Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * website: fix the exit keys, the plugin warning, and the redirect gap Three claims on the chat-agent pages that the code does not back. try-it-out told readers to press Ctrl+D. nib has no Ctrl+D handler: the full-screen interface quits on Esc or Ctrl+C, and Ctrl+D is only an exit in --cli, where it arrives as ordinary tty EOF. That sentence had replaced the removed /exit and /quit text, so the page was left with no working way to leave a session. Document both modes, since they differ. The plugin warning said nothing tells you the install stopped short. It does: the command prints that the plugin was left disabled. What it does not do is say so in its exit code, which is 0 either way. That is the part a script cannot work around, and it is the reason to pass --yes. Overstating it in the paragraph that gives the advice only makes the advice easier to dismiss. Redirecting stdout no longer refuses; the interface goes to /dev/tty and only the yanked command reaches the file. It is what lets the Ctrl+Space widget capture a command at all, since a redirect and out=$(...) are the same thing to the stream gate. It was documented nowhere. A non-terminal stdin is still refused, and the new text says which of the two it is. Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * fix(chat): make the CLI flags outrank the agent config file local-ai chat routed --endpoint, --model, --api-key, --trace-dir and --yolo through nib's app.Options.Defaults. Defaults are seeds: they sit beneath the config file, so the file silently undoes them. That made the flags accepted and inert, and not in an edge case, since EnsureStateDir writes base_url on the first run and the interactive picker writes model, so from the second run on the file carried a value for both. Observed against a live server: with base_url: http://127.0.0.1:9999/v1 in the config and --endpoint http://127.0.0.1:8080 on the command line, the probe hit 8080 and every agent turn posted to 9999. With model: gemma-4-e2b-it-qat-q4_0 in the config, --model lfm2.5-8b-a1b was ignored on the wire. nib v0.6.0 adds app.Options.Overrides, applied above the config file and above the bare environment block. Move the whole block there: all five values are decisions this invocation already made on the user's behalf, and a flag the config file can undo is not a flag. Nothing is left in Defaults, because LocalAI's one genuine seed, the initial base_url, is written into the config file by EnsureStateDir rather than handed to nib. Two limits come with the channel and are documented on agentOptions rather than worked around. An override can only raise a field, since nib cannot tell "set to the zero value" from "not set", so --yolo can turn approval off but nothing on the command line turns it back on over an approval_mode: auto in the file. And nib's own NIB_TRACE_DIR and NIB_YOLO are resolved after the config load and still outrank these, deliberately, upstream. The existing spec pinned that the right values reach app.Options, which they always did, which is exactly why it could not see nib discarding them. The new specs resolve the config the way app.Run resolves it, against a real config file that disagrees with every flag, and one asserts Defaults stays empty. docs/content/features/terminal-agent.md already documented --model as winning over the saved model; that was false before this change and is true now, so no docs edit was needed. Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Bash] [Edit] [Write] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * fix(chat): document intentional config file read Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5 [gosec] --------- Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> 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 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 | 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
- 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:
Past sponsors
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!