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

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.

systemctl status open-webui.service
● open-webui.service - Open Web UI for LLMs
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/open-webui.service; disabled; preset: disabled)
     Active: active (running) since Fri 2025-01-31 18:40:21 CST; 6s ago
 Invocation: d0c7df71d54e42dba441d57e1f495bb9
   Main PID: 114168 (uvicorn)
      Tasks: 37 (limit: 76666)
     Memory: 585.7M (peak: 585.9M)
        CPU: 7.839s
     CGroup: /system.slice/open-webui.service
             └─114168 /opt/open-webui/backend/venv/bin/python3.12 /opt/open-webui/backend/venv/bin/uvicorn open_webui.main:app --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8080 --forwarded-allow-ips "*"

but I cannot access localhost:8080 from firefox

running from venv

it turns out to be

peewee.OperationalError: unable to open database file

@mistersmee thanks, that worked for me

@gpepi, you need to do sudoedit /opt/open-webui/backend/start.sh, I believe line 8 specifies the port as 8080. You probably also can edit /etc/open-webui.conf and add PORT=desired port to have the same effect.

how does one change the listening port? 8080 is already used by another service which I can't disable

Sorry my fault. The whisper setting was not available in the user settings. But it is in the admin settings.

@almanac, I see no reason why it shouldn't work, though I haven't used it myself. The internal plumbing for it is there, what with python-faster-whisper being in requirements.txt

Hey, I was interested in using whisper with open-webui. There should be good integration. But it seems not available out of the box. Do we need to install it separately (through aur)? Does it work with other people here?

@kreijstal, cannot reproduce here, and I see no reason why it could happen, we're using the correct command python3.12 to create the virtualenv. Is python312 installed? Other than that, I can't think of anything that could cause it.

I guess I could force the package to remove any virtualenvs in the required location it finds before installing or upgrading the package using install hooks. The hooks have been modified with 0.5.4-2. Let me know if that helps.

lrwxrwxrwx 1 kreijstal kreijstal      15 20. Dez 00:16 python -> /usr/bin/python
lrwxrwxrwx 1 kreijstal kreijstal       6 20. Dez 00:16 python3 -> python
lrwxrwxrwx 1 kreijstal kreijstal       6 20. Dez 00:16 python3.12 -> python

When lsing ./venv/bin created from pkgbuild, it seems it uses python 3.13 not 3.12... even when installing open-webui for the first time after transition to 3.13

Hey thanks. This was very helpful. I did start the service with systemctl and was able to visit open webui on the the 8080 port