Accessing Ollama from other machines

Ollama runs on port 11434 (an allusion to llama if you did not know).

If you run it on your machine and try to access it from another machine in your network, you will realize it does not work. This is because Ollama binds to localhost by default.

In order to fix this, you need to set the OLLAMA_HOST environment variable to 0.0.0.0. This tells Ollama to listen on all network interfaces.

What you can do is edit the sudo vi /etc/systemd/system/ollama.service file and add Environment="OLLAMA_HOST=0.0.0.0" to it.

The complete file might look like this:

[Unit]
Description=Ollama Service
After=network-online.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/ollama serve
User=ollama
Group=ollama
Restart=always
RestartSec=3
Environment="PATH=/usr/local/cuda/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin"
Environment="OLLAMA_HOST=0.0.0.0"

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Save that file and then run:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart ollama

Voila!