Ollama

Ollama is supported both as a text/llm provider, and also can be used for embeddings generation.

To use Ollama locally, make sure you have it running first and the desired models downloaded.

Provider Configuration (Recommended)

config.set {
  ai = {
    providers = {
      ollama = {
        baseUrl = "http://localhost:11434/v1",
        useProxy = false,  -- Bypass SilverBullet's proxy for local requests
        preferredModels = {"llama3.2", "qwen2.5-coder"}
      }
    },
    -- Optional: auto-select a default model on startup
    defaultTextModel = "ollama:llama3.2"
  }
}

With this configuration:

• Run "AI: Select Text Model" to see all models from your Ollama instance
• "AI: Refresh Model List" updates the cached model list
• preferredModels appear first in the picker (marked with ★)

Legacy Configuration

Deprecated

The textModels array configuration is deprecated. Please migrate to the providers config above.

config.set {
  ai = {
    textModels = {
      {
        name = "ollama-phi-2",
        modelName = "phi",
        provider = "ollama",
        baseUrl = "http://localhost:11434/v1",
        requireAuth = false,
        useProxy = false
      }
    },
    embeddingModels = {
      {
        name = "ollama-all-minilm",
        modelName = "all-minilm",
        provider = "ollama",
        baseUrl = "http://localhost:11434",
        requireAuth = false,
        useProxy = false
      }
    }
  }
}

Embedding Models

Embedding models still use the legacy embeddingModels array:

config.set {
  ai = {
    providers = {
      ollama = { baseUrl = "http://localhost:11434/v1", useProxy = false }
    },
    embeddingModels = {
      {
        name = "ollama-all-minilm",
        modelName = "all-minilm",
        provider = "ollama",
        baseUrl = "http://localhost:11434",
        requireAuth = false,
        useProxy = false
      }
    }
  }
}

Configuration Options

• useProxy: Set to false to bypass SilverBullet's proxy and make requests directly from the client browser. Useful if running ollama somewhere accessible by the client, but not by the silverbullet server.
• requireAuth: Ollama defaults to false. Set to true if you have a reverse proxy providing authentication.

Docker Configuration

If running both SilverBullet and Ollama in Docker on the same machine, use host.docker.internal instead of localhost:

config.set {
  ai = {
    providers = {
      ollama = {
        baseUrl = "http://host.docker.internal:11434/v1",
        useProxy = true
      }
    }
  }
}

Note

host.docker.internal is available on Docker Desktop (Mac/Windows) and recent versions of Docker on Linux. On older Linux Docker installations, you may need to add --add-host=host.docker.internal:host-gateway to your docker run command.

Multiple Ollama Instances

You can configure multiple Ollama instances by using different key names with the explicit provider field:

config.set {
  ai = {
    providers = {
      ollamaLocal = {
        provider = "ollama",  -- Explicit provider type
        baseUrl = "http://localhost:11434/v1",
        useProxy = false
      },
      ollamaRemote = {
        provider = "ollama",
        baseUrl = "http://my-server:11434/v1",
        useProxy = true
      }
    }
  }
}

Ollama Server Configuration

When running Ollama, these are some useful environment variables/options:

• OLLAMA_ORIGINS - Allow silverbullet's hostname if not using useProxy=true.
• OLLAMA_HOST - By default, only 127.0.0.1 is exposed. If you use ollama on a different machine, this may need changed.
• OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH - By default, Ollama only uses a 4k context window. You'll most likely want to increase this.
• OLLAMA_FLASH_ATTENTION=1 - Can reduce memory usage as context size grows.
• OLLAMA_KV_CACHE_TYPE=q8_0 - Quantizes the K/V context cache so that less memory is used by the context cache.

Please see docs.ollama.com/faq for more information.