Arch Linux User Repository

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.

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

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, 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.

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.

@mistersmee awesome, thanks mate

@envolution, after trying and testing stuff, I've gone with the second approach you suggested, as while what I said about it not building with the latest nodejs version is true, it doesn't actually require nodejs to run at all, so I'm dropping it entirely from the dependencies.

@envolution, the package simply doesn't build or run with just nodejs as dependency, upstream has nodejs pinned to 18.13.0 <= nodejs <= 22.x.x, and nodejs is at 23.x.x in the repos. It's not a case of reminding users that a certain version of node is supported, it's moving around the versions of node that aren't supported.

please set node dependency to node rather than nodejs-lts-iron - it's fine to remind users that a certain version of node is supported, but you should assume users have various ways of managing node versions themselves

you could also

PKGBUILD
_ensure_local_nvm() {
    export NVM_DIR="${srcdir}/.nvm"
    source /usr/share/nvm/init-nvm.sh || [[ $? != 1 ]]
    nvm install
    nvm use
    echo "in _ensure nvm dir = ${NVM_DIR}"
}

echo "lts/iron" > .nvmrc
_ensure_local_nvm
...build steps...

but i think open-webui probably wouldn't need this enforecment

@dbb, done, permissions on data directory set to 700, with pkgrel 0.4.3-2