Arch Linux User Repository

@almanac, Because of how open-webui is structured, and the docker-first approach upstream, it requires a fair bit of manual setup when starting the application, what with the environment variables and everything.

So basically, in order to un-dockerise and make it so that open-webui runs as applications are supposed to on Arch, and so that everyone doesn't need to fiddle with environment variables and such, we use a systemd service, so to start open-webui, you should run: sudo systemctl start open-webui.service

Starting the service above replaces the command "open-webui serve" to "start the Open WebUI server, which you can access at http://localhost:8080". Restart the service by using sudo systemctl restart open-webui.service or by stopping and starting the service, if the aforementioned URL shows "Unable to connect" while systemctl status open-webui.service shows the service as active. If neither of those resolve the "Unable to connect" issue, rebooting your system might help. (thanks to arsCynic for bringing up how people might be confused by the unclear instructions, so making them more clear.)

Secondly, the reason why you can't do a simple open-webui serve, and can't find open-webui in the PATH anywhere is due to the way this package is currently structured.

We're using a virtual environment to manage the Python dependencies required to run the application, because that was the way this was set up since before I was maintaining this PKGBUILD (open-webui-git is the original PKGBUILD, I just yoinked and un-git-ified it).

In my personal opinion, this is an ugly way, hence I tried to un-virtualenv it, but a few dependencies fail in the check() portion, so it was decided to keep the current approach to reduce user friction.

You can find the non-virtualenv package at open-webui-no-venv, which does work, apart from needing to comment out the check() portions of the PKGBUILD of the dependencies that are failing.

You can do a open-webui serve when using open-webui-no-venv, but the aforementioned environment variables still need to be set, so even then it's still recommended to use the systemd service, but it is technically possible to do it.

Hope this lengthy explanation helps.

Edit: I should probably pin this, so I'll do that.

Due to failing build dependencies, the rework has been reverted, as of 0.5.3-3. As suggested by @Davidyz, I've created a separate package, open-webui-no-venv, that uses the reworked PKGBUILD.

PSA everyone, I intend to rework major parts of the PKGBUILD and the way open-webui is installed on the system so that we can get rid of the virtualenv and the long time it takes to build on every install. Also, it should make it so that you don't need to do the things that I mentioned in the first pinned note.

I've tested the changes on my end, and you don't need to do anything when updating from the old way to the new way, it should work just fine as it is, but still, this is a major change. I'll be moving installing the python dependencies from inside a virtualenv to installing the python dependencies system-wide.

If there are any bugs after the rework, which will be updated as 0.5.3-2 pkgrel bump, which are related to open-webui itself, rather than it's dependencies, please add a comment, and I'll fix them, and if there are too many, or some are unfixable, I'll revert the rework.

Note to all existing users (those who will be upgrading the package, not installing it anew, people installing anew should be fine):

When major Python versions switch (as just happened with Python 3.12 -> 3.13), I believe it would be prudent to delete the virtual environment created by the backend, done so manually by doing a sudo rm -r /opt/open-webui/backend/venv, and then reinstalling the open-webui package, thus rebuilding the virtual environment with the new Python major version.

Just reinstalling the open-webui package without removing or uninstalling makes sure that your user data, that is used in openwebui, for e.g., your admin password, remains as it is.

As an addendum, this might be applicable when the python package itself is changed due to dependency mismatches (again, as just happened when I changed the dependency from python to python312, and would happen again once python 3.13 is supported upstream back to python from python312), I'm not so sure about this, so testing might be needed, but just to be safe, please do so as well.

This is so that any mismatches between the Python version that created the virtualenv and the Python version in use, and any problems that might arise from that, can be avoided.

@30p87, thanks a lot for catching that, I hadn't realised it. Should be fixed by the pkgrel bump 0.6.13-2. I have no idea how that slipped through the cracks, when fiddling with open_webui.install, I must have forgotten to change the paths.

Is it intended that the .install script removes "${_apphome}/venv" in pre_install/upgrade, but installs the venv to "${_apphome}/backend/venv" in _install? As far as I can tell, "${_apphome}/venv" is never initialized, nor used. Because that meant that my ${_apphome}/backend/venv was never cleaned, and at some point used python 3.13 instead of 3.12, which is unsupported. Therefore, it failed to install some dependencies, which was my issue and may be the issue @NullX47 encountered. I guess it's hard to encounter and realize because rm does not give a warning if a file does not exist in the first place, and because for it to cause problems the venv must be corrupted somehow (eg. wrong python version).

@envolution, I see, that makes a lot of sense. And yes, I have done so in the last update 0.6.12-1

@mistersmee

you may want something like the following in your install script

if [[ -f "/etc/${_appname}.conf" ]]; then
  secret_key=$(head -c 12 /dev/urandom | base64 | tr -d '\n')
  escaped_secret_key=$(printf '%s' "$secret_key" | sed 's/[&|]/\\&/g')
  sed -i "s|{{GENERATED_KEY}}|$escaped_secret_key|" "/etc/${_appname}.conf"
fi

to avoid the sed error. any error in that function produces a dependency error message due to your exit code comparison '||'

@NullX47, the sed command in open_webui.install, the one that gives that message, has nothing to do with dependencies at all. Something else in the chain is unable to install some sort of dependencies, and unfortunately, the pacman log, while in general helpful, does not give any hints as to what exactly is going wrong, and even more unfortunately, I am unable to reproduce your error on my system, open-webui installs and updates just fine.

@mistersmee , all the dependencies are installed successfully without any errors

the "Failed to install dependencies" error because the 'sed' "unknown option to `s'" error are output for the whole _install funcation in open-webui.install script

the pacman log : https://paste.cachyos.org/p/fd64ed1

@NullX47, as per the error message, some dependency failed to build and install. Without information about which dependency failed, I cannot help you.

Installing default config file...

Generating random WEBUI_SECRET_KEY...

sed: -e expression #1, char 32: unknown option to `s'

ERROR: Failed to install dependencies

@sthalik, that is because A) if you run pip install open-webui, it will install binary wheel which has aleady been built, and this is a package that is built from source, not a binary version. And B) if it cannot find a binary wheel or you specify it to build from source in pip, it ultimately does the same thing that this package does, and builds the frontend using node.js.

@mistersmee, but you can run python -m pip install open-webui and it won't need any of these dependencies.