ChatOllama is an open source chatbot based on LLMs. It supports a wide range of language models including:

• Ollama served models
• OpenAI
• Azure OpenAI
• Anthropic

ChatOllama supports multiple types of chat:

• Free chat with LLMs
• Chat with LLMs based on knowledge base

ChatOllama feature list:

• Ollama models management
• Knowledge bases management
• Chat
• Commercial LLMs API keys management

If you are a user, contributor, or even just new to ChatOllama, you are more than welcome to join our community on Discord by clicking the invite link.

If you are a contributor, the channel technical-discussion is for you, where we discuss technical stuff.

If you have any issue in ChatOllama usage, please report to channel customer-support. We will help you out as soon as we can.

As a user of ChatOllama, please walk through the document below, to make sure you get all the components up and running before starting using ChatOllama.

If you'd like to run with the latest code base and apply changes as needed, you can clone this repository and follow the steps below.

1. Install and run Ollama server

   You will need an Ollama server running. Follow the installation guide of Ollama. By default, it's running on http://localhost:11434.

2. Install Chroma

   Please refer to https://docs.trychroma.com/getting-started for Chroma installation.

   We recommend you run it in a docker container:

   #https://hub.docker.com/r/chromadb/chroma/tags
   
   docker pull chromadb/chroma
   docker run -d -p 8000:8000 chromadb/chroma

   Now, ChromaDB is running on http://localhost:8000

3. ChatOllama Setup

   Now, we can complete the necessary setup to run ChatOllama.

   3.1 Copy the .env.example file to .env file:

    ```bash
    cp .env.example .env
    ```
   

   3.2 Make sure to install the dependencies:

    ```bash
    # npm
    npm install
   
    # pnpm
    pnpm install
   
    # yarn
    yarn install
   
    # bun
    bun install
    ```
   

   3.3 Run a migration to create your database tables with Prisma Migrate

    ```bash
    # npm
    npm run prisma-migrate
   
    # pnpm
    pnpm prisma-migrate
   
    # yarn
    yarn prisma-migrate
   
    # bun
    bun run prisma-migrate
    ```
   

4. Launch Development Server

   Make sure both Ollama Server and ChromaDB are running.

   Start the development server on http://localhost:3000:

   # npm
   npm run dev
   
   # pnpm
   pnpm dev
   
   # yarn
   yarn dev
   
   # bun
   bun run dev

This is the easist way to use ChatOllama.

The only thing you need is a copy of docker-compose.yaml. Please download it and execute the command below to launch ChatOllama.

$ docker compose up

As ChatOllama is running within a docker container, you should set Ollama server to http://host.docker.internal:11434 in the Settings section, assuming your Ollama server is running locally with default port.

Make sure you initialize the SQLite database as below if you are launching the dockerized ChatOllama for the first time:

$ docker compose exec chatollama npx prisma migrate dev

When using KnowledgeBases, we need a valid embedding model in place. It can be one of the models downloaded by Ollama or from 3rd party service provider for example, OpenAI.

Ollama Managed Embedding Model

We recommand you download nomic-embed-text model for embedding purpose.

You can do so on Models page http://localhost:3000/models, or via CLI as below if you are using Docker.

# In the folder of docker-compose.yaml

docker compose exec ollama ollama pull nomic-embed-text:latest

OpenAI Embedding Model

If you prefer to use OpenAI, please make sure you set a valid OpenAI API Key in Settings, and fill with one of the OpenAI embedding models listed below:

• text-embedding-3-large
• text-embedding-3-small
• text-embedding-ada-002

There are 2 types of data storage, vector data and relational data. See the summary below and for more details, please refer to docker-compose.yaml for the settings.

With docker-compose.yaml, a dockerized Chroma database is run side by side with ChatOllama. The data is persisted in a docker volume.

The SQLite database file is persisted and mounted from ~/.chatollama/chatollama.sqlite.

As ChatOllama is still under active development, features, interfaces and database schema may be changed. Please follow the instructions below in your every git pull to make sure your dependencies and database schema are always in sync.

1. Install the latest dependencies
   • npm install OR
   • pnpm install
2. Prisma migrate
   • pnpm run prisma-migrate OR
   • npm run prisma-migrate

Here we summarize what's done and released in our day-to-day development.

1. Instructions data will be stored in SQLite database.
2. vueuse is introduced for storage management.