Avoid launching a web browser

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1

Hi Jeff and OOD team,

I am implementing an AI platform via open-webui. I can launch the standard desktop app, then start the service open-webui followed by opening a web browser at (http://localhost:8080). This is not user-friendly.

I want to bypass the web browser instead of using a proxy, similar to Jupyterlab or vscode. I have view.html.erb and need to tweak the parameters.

Please advise! A Zoom session would be highly appreciated.
Wei

2

I’m not 100% sure I have the availability to meet. I guess I can offer these tips:

  • you need to boot the app on a port we allocate and set the port environment variable to. (you can see in Jupyter how this is done)
  • You likely need to fix the root URL for the app to not be just / but instead be /node/$host/$port (you can see in Jupyter how this is done)
  • Your view.html.erb should handle any authentication you need by providing the password/credentials in a <form>, header or query parameters.

If you can share the app maybe I can take a look asynchronously.

3

Thank you, Jeff!

I will modify/debug further before sharing the code with you.

Wei

4

Hi Jeff,

Thank you!
I can start ollama and launch its GUI via open-webui using the standard desktop app:

This works but is not user-friendly. Therefore, I want to create a LM app, which is similar to VScode server or Jupyter Notebook.

[wfeinstein@n0000 lrc_LM]$ cat view.html.erb
<form action=“/node/<%= host %>/<%= port %>/login” method=“post” target=“_blank”>
<input type=“hidden” name=“password” value=“<%= password %>”>
<button class=“btn btn-primary” type=“submit”>
<i class=“fa fa-eye”></i> Connect to Open WebUI
</button>
</form>

[wfeinstein@n0000 lrc_LM]$ cat template/before.sh.erb
# Export the module function if it exists
[[ $(type -t module) == “function” ]] && export -f module
# Find available port to run server on
export port=$(find_port ${host})
# Export compute node the script is running on
export host=“${host}”
# Generate SHA1 encrypted password (requires OpenSSL installed)
SALT=“$(create_passwd 16)”
password=“$(create_passwd 16)”
PASSWORD_SHA1=“$(echo -n “${password}${SALT}” | openssl dgst -sha1 | awk ‘{print $NF}’)”
source /global/home/groups/scs/wfeinstein/ollama/startup.sh

[wfeinstein@n0000 lrc_LM]$ cat template/script.sh.erb
#!/usr/bin/env bash
echo “TIMING - Starting main script at: $(date)”
cd “${HOME}”
module purge
module load <%= context.modules %>
<%- end -%>
# Start Ollama in the background
ollama &
# Wait for Ollama to initialize (adjust sleep time as needed)
sleep 10
open-webui serve --port ${port}

The app didn’t launch; output.log has some info for further debugging. In addition, “connection.yaml” didn’t get created in the same directory.

[root@perceus-00 output]# cat 3940c616-a301-4ab8-8606-60ae373c6447/output.log
Setting VNC password…
Starting VNC server…
Desktop ‘TurboVNC: n0357.lr6:1 (wfeinstein)’ started on display n0357.lr6:1
Log file is vnc.log
Successfully started VNC server on n0357.lr6:5901…
Script starting…
Waiting for open-webui server to open port 31011…
TIMING - Starting wait at: Sat Feb 22 11:27:23 PST 2025
TIMING - Starting main script at: Sat Feb 22 11:27:23 PST 2025
/global/home/groups/scs/wfeinstein/ollama/usr/bin/ollama
Usage:
ollama [flags]
ollama [command]
Available Commands:
serve Start ollama
create Create a model from a Modelfile
show Show information for a model
run Run a model
stop Stop a running model
pull Pull a model from a registry
push Push a model to a registry
list List models
ps List running models
cp Copy a model
rm Remove a model
help Help about any command
Flags:
-h, --help help for ollama
-v, --version Show version information
Use “ollama [command] --help” for more information about a command.
Loading WEBUI_SECRET_KEY from file, not provided as an environment variable.
Loading WEBUI_SECRET_KEY from /global/home/users/wfeinstein/.webui_secret_key
INFO [alembic.runtime.migration] Context impl SQLiteImpl.
INFO [alembic.runtime.migration] Will assume non-transactional DDL.
INFO [open_webui.env] ‘ENABLE_SIGNUP’ loaded from the latest database entry
INFO [open_webui.env] ‘DEFAULT_LOCALE’ loaded from the latest database entry
INFO [open_webui.env] ‘DEFAULT_PROMPT_SUGGESTIONS’ loaded from the latest database entry
WARNI [open_webui.env]
WARNING: CORS_ALLOW_ORIGIN IS SET TO ‘*’ - NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PRODUCTION DEPLOYMENTS.
INFO [open_webui.env] Embedding model set: sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2
/global/home/groups/scs/wfeinstein/ollama/local/site-packages/pydub/utils.py:170: RuntimeWarning: Couldn’t find ffmpeg or avconv - defaulting to ffmpeg, but may not work
warn(“Couldn’t find ffmpeg or avconv - defaulting to ffmpeg, but may not work”, RuntimeWarning)
WARNI [langchain_community.utils.user_agent] USER_AGENT environment variable not set, consider setting it to identify your requests.
/global/home/groups/scs/wfeinstein/ollama/local/site-packages/open_webui
/global/home/groups/scs/wfeinstein/ollama/local/site-packages
/global/home/groups/scs/wfeinstein/ollama/local
Running migrations
___ __ __ _ _ _ ___
/ _ \ _ __ ___ _ __ \ \ / /__| |__ | | | |_ _|
| | | | '_ \ / _ \ '_ \ \ \ /\ / / _ \ '_ \| | | || |
| |_| | |_) | __/ | | | \ V V / __/ |_) | |_| || |
\___/| .__/ \___|_| |_| \_/\_/ \___|_.__/ \___/|___|
|_|
v0.5.12 - building the best open-source AI user interface.

Fetching 30 files: 100%|██████████| 30/30 [00:00<00:00, 24750.02it/s]
INFO: Started server process [2061819]
INFO: Waiting for application startup.
INFO: Application startup complete.
INFO: Uvicorn running on http://0.0.0.0:31011 (Press CTRL+C to quit)
Discovered open-webui server listening on port 31011!
TIMING - Wait ended at: Sat Feb 22 11:27:46 PST 2025
Starting websocket server…
[websockify]: pid: 2062089 (proxying 25880 ==> localhost:31011)
[websockify]: log file: ./websockify.log
[websockify]: waiting …
[websockify]: failed to launch!
Cleaning up…
Killing Xvnc process ID 2061649

Hope the code and log file above are helpful for debugging.

Thanks,

5

It looks like the web service started at proxying 25880, which theoretically could be viewed at localhost:31011. Any ideas of how I should tweak it?

Thanks,

6

Hi Wei,

I am also working on a similar project with Open WebUI. The problem that I have encountered is that Open WebUI does not currently allow you to set a different root URL for the server instance; see Jeff’s second point above. This is important for reverse proxy applications as he explains in his post. Using these servers within a reverse proxy is a relatively common thing that many other apps support; for instance, Gradio has this feature built-in.

Open WebUI uses a mix of absolute and relative paths to indicate where different files are located to be served out. I have had some success modifying the source code but it is still a work in progress.

7

Hi Anderss,

Thank you for sharing, and glad to know you are working on a similar project with webUI.
Do you have a few minutes to share some of your work in progress, including Webui’s mixed paths?

Thank you,
Wei

8

Hi Wei,

Sure, although I don’t have a lot of answers to share. My week is pretty full but how about we meet next Monday afternoon? I am in Eastern time.

Best,
Sean

1 Like
9

Hi Sean,

Sounds great next Monday afternoon. I will set up a Zoom call if you can share your email or vice versa.

Thank you,
Wei

1 Like
10

Hi Wei,

Sure: anderss at wfu.edu

Anytime between 3–5 PM EST works for me.

Best,
Sean

11

HI Sean,

Thank you! Sent you a Zoom invite.

Wei

12

@wfeinstein it was nice meeting you today - this is the OSC app that I was talking about. However, looking at it, the 3rd party application (stable diffusion web ui) is based off of Gradio, not openweb UI as I may have thought (Gradio is a different popular web framework).

Taking a quick look at Web UI, it doesn’t appear to support setting the base URL which is something that’s required for OOD to work correctly and proxy to it. Indeed reading this discussion, you can see someone else asking for OOD as well.

That said - there appears to be some hack in that discussion with the svelte config that you can use, maybe.

13

@lcrownover is on that discussion, maybe he knows more about this?

14

I have worked with OpenWeb-UI a Little and based on some of their PR’s that have tried to fix this solution they do not seem to want to take patches to fix this issue. So I came up with a way to do this with nginx and re-writing. Basically I have an app that runs three containers:

  1. Ollama running on the default port.
  2. OpenWeb-UI running on the default port.
  3. nginx with a templated rewrite config(Open OnDemand OpenWeb-UI nginx Rewriting code. ¡ GitHub) on a generated port.

here are the relevant lines from my script.sh.erb

export OLLAMA_HOST=127.0.0.1:11434
export OLLAMA_MODELS=/cluster/ollama_models
apptainer run --nv --writable-tmpfs library://ondemand/ollama:latest  serve &
mkdir openwebui. # this is where the database shows up, and is per-instance
apptainer run  --overlay openwebui --env-file env_file library://ondemand/openwebui:latest &
 apptainer run --writable-tmpfs \
     --env FORWARD_PORT=${port} \
     --env FORWARD_HOST=${host} \
     -B ./templates:/etc/nginx/templates \
     -B ./:/var/log/nginx/ \
     -B ./conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/ \
     --app docker \
     library://ondemand/nginx:latest nginx

the file on gist is in the template/templates/ directory so that it can be found by nginx

Disclaimer, this is not production, but does work. There are a few know issues:

  1. reconnecting after the initial click requires cleaning out cookies in the browser.
  2. openwebui seems to rewrite the URL in the browser, so you lose the ability to copy-paste the URL to get back where you are.

Some Singularity Gists:

If you Improve on these scripts, let me know!

15

Hi all,
@wfeinstein showed me this thread which is exactly what I’ve been working on the past few months. My talk at GOOD conference was related to this. Evan’s setup rewriting html is one way to approach this but isn’t exact since there is some minified javascript in open-webui that won’t fit those patterns.
I did manually rewrite open-webui to support relative URIs (some others have as well), the branch is available here:

But now to do this automatically without requiring rewrites we use a proxy to put the web service on a secondary root domain (for details, see my talk). I’m aiming to opensource it soon and will try to post here when it is ready.