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.

@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

@mistersmee That works, but I would install the data directory with --mode=700 (or maybe 750 or 770) since on a multiuser system you probably don't want other users being able to read those files.

@dbb, the latest version I pushed, 0.4.3-1 should fix this alongside being the latest upstream version, please test and see if it was fixed.

With a fresh install there's an peewee.OperationalError: unable to open database file exception on startup. Seems to be because while the package installs /var/opt/open-webui it does not install /var/opt/open-webui/data. I created that directory, chown-ed it to open-webui, chmod-ed it to 700, and it seems to startup and run fine now.