Package Details: open-webui 0.5.7-1

Git Clone URL: https://aur.archlinux.org/open-webui.git (read-only, click to copy)
Package Base: open-webui
Description: Web UI and OpenAI API for various LLM runners, including Ollama
Upstream URL: https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui
Licenses: MIT
Conflicts: open-webui-git
Submitter: mistersmee
Maintainer: mistersmee
Last Packager: mistersmee
Votes: 6
Popularity: 3.10
First Submitted: 2024-10-09 08:08 (UTC)
Last Updated: 2025-01-24 03:28 (UTC)

Dependencies (5)

Required by (0)

Sources (3)

Pinned Comments

mistersmee commented on 2025-01-16 15:41 (UTC) (edited on 2025-01-16 15:42 (UTC) by mistersmee)

@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

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.

mistersmee commented on 2025-01-05 15:52 (UTC)

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.

mistersmee commented on 2025-01-03 11:45 (UTC)

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.

mistersmee commented on 2024-12-24 16:27 (UTC) (edited on 2024-12-26 07:20 (UTC) by mistersmee)

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.

Latest Comments

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mistersmee commented on 2024-12-27 03:38 (UTC)

@devome, I've added them in the latest commit, but I haven't bumped the pkgrel because nothing of note changed build-wise, so it won't be reflected on your system when you do sudo pacman -Qi open-webui, but by the next upstream release or pkgrel, it will show on your system as well.

evine commented on 2024-12-27 01:59 (UTC)

Is it possible to add optional dependencies for ollama and tika-server?

30p87 commented on 2024-12-25 23:02 (UTC)

@TheGreatAndyChow You'd usually use systemd for that, so sudo systemctl start open-webui.service. If you really want to manually start it, you'd first change user to open-webui (sudo -u open-webui bash (or replace bash with whatever shell you use)), then source /etc/open-webui.conf and export PYTHONUNBUFFERED=1, then change directory (cd /opt/open-webui) and finally start it, by invoking python: /bin/bash -c "cd /opt/open-webui/backend && source ./venv/bin/activate && bash start.sh"

I just pulled that from the systemd service, and didn't test it, but it should work.

TheGreatAndyChow commented on 2024-12-25 22:32 (UTC)

I'm confused how to use this. When I installed, there are the files in /opt/open-webui, however, even after reboot, there is no command "open-webui" from the terminal and the port http://localhost:8080/ isn't serving anything. Do I need to manually source something to get the command available?

mistersmee commented on 2024-12-25 03:34 (UTC) (edited on 2024-12-25 03:35 (UTC) by mistersmee)

@30p87, I'm not quite sure how that would work, as it would have to check if the Python major version changed, and ignore the minor version changes.

If it triggered on every python or python3xx package update, then people would have to rebuild it fairly frequently and needlessly, as compared to whenever it is actually needed, which is at most once a year barring the few weeks of uncertainty until the newest major version gets supported, since Python major versions are released on a yearly cycle.

30p87 commented on 2024-12-24 16:40 (UTC)

@mistersmee Maybe you could add a pacman hook for python, triggering a rebuild of the venv on update?

mistersmee commented on 2024-12-24 16:27 (UTC) (edited on 2024-12-26 07:20 (UTC) by mistersmee)

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.

mistersmee commented on 2024-12-24 16:20 (UTC)

@30p87, Python 3.12 has been confirmed to be working perfectly fine not only here on Arch by me and others, but upstream as well.

And once the pinned dependencies upstream get bumped up by the dependabot bot, hopefully after the dependencies themselves get updated with support for Python 3.13, and once upstream tags a new release, Python 3.13 will be supported as well, I'll test once that happens and update as such.

But yes, as of now, Python 3.13 support currently isn't present, so we're sticking to Python 3.12 for now.

30p87 commented on 2024-12-17 22:56 (UTC)

The Github package explicitly recommends python311, and this would solve problems of some packages/libraries being deprecated in 3.12, but still working, but not existing at all for 3.13, which is the current -testing version. So the package uses a not-recommended python version right now, which deprecates dependencies, and the package is non installable/runnable with python > 3.12, so testing.

Changing the dependencies in the PKGBUILD from just python to python311, and explicitly using python3.11 instead of just python in the .install fixes everything I observed.