Lab 1.5 Configuring Open-WebUI

Setup

Let's start by configuring Open-WebUI and ollama to talk to one another. The following screenshots will be from a Mac, but this should be similar on Windows and Linux.

First, if you haven't already, download the Granite 3.1 model. Make sure that ollama is running in the background (you may have to run ollama serve in its own terminal depending on how you installed it) and in another terminal run the following command:

ollama pull granite3.1-dense:8b

Note

The download may take a few minutes depending on your internet connection. In the meantime, you can check out information about model we're using here. Check out how many languages it supports and take note of its capabilities. It'll help you decide what tasks you might want to use it for in the future.

Open up Open-WebUI (assuming you've run open-webui serve):

If you see something similar, Open-WebUI is installed correctly! Continue on, if not, please find a workshop TA or raise your hand for some help.

Click Getting Started. Fill out the next screen and click the Create Admin Account. This will be your login for your local machine. Remember that this because it will be your Open-WebUI configuration login information if want to dig deeper into it after this workshop.

You should see the Open-WebUI main page now, with granite3.1-dense:latest right there in the center!

Testing the Connection

Test it out! I like asking the question, "Who is Batman?" as a sanity check. Every LLM should know who Batman is.

The first response may take a minute to process. This is because ollama is spinning up to serve the model. Subsequent responses should be much faster.

You may notice that your answer is slighty different then the screen shot above. This is expected and nothing to worry about!

Conclusion

Congratulations! Now you have Open-WebUI running and it's configured to work with granite3.1-dense and ollama. Move on to Lab 2 and have a chat with your model!