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← Own your AI · Mission 3 of 31

Your own private ChatGPT, in your browser

Put Open WebUI on top of Ollama and you get the ChatGPT experience: chat history, file uploads, voice, and model switching. All of it running on your own machine.

30 minIntermediateTools: FreeStep 1 free
Tested 7 Oct 2026 · Open WebUI 0.11.4, uv 0.12, Ollama 0.40, Windows 11
Open WebUI running at localhost:8080, a ChatGPT-style app in your browser
It automatically finds the models you downloaded with Ollama
Chat with your own PDFs and documents, privately
  • A desktop shortcut that starts it and opens your browser in one double-click
  • A setup with no Docker, using one tool (uv) that handles Python for you
Before you start
  • The previous lesson done: Ollama installed with a model downloaded. Gemma 4 needs Ollama 0.20.7 or newer: check with ollama --version.
  • About 6GB of free disk space (it pulls in a lot of Python packages and a few small helper models)
  • About 30 minutes. The first start alone takes around 8 minutes while it downloads Python 3.11, about 245 packages and some small helper models. After that it starts in about 2 minutes.
01/06Install uv0 done
STEP 01 of 06~3 min

Install uv

Open WebUI needs a specific Python version (3.11). uv fetches it for you, so you don't touch your own Python.

  1. Most guides tell you to install Docker first, which is a whole extra app to install and keep running. This mission uses uv instead: a small, fast Python tool that downloads the right version of everything automatically. Already have uv from another lesson? Skip to the check.

    Windows
    winget install --id astral-sh.uv -e
    Mac with Homebrew
    brew install uv
    Mac / Linux without Homebrew
    curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

  2. Close the terminal, open a new one, and check:

    Terminal
    uv --version
✓
Checkpointuv --version prints a version number.
If it breaksWhy not just pip install open-webui?
Why not just pip install open-webui?
Open WebUI only supports Python 3.11 and 3.12. If your own Python is 3.13 or newer, the project says it will fail. uv sidesteps that by using its own copy of 3.11 for Open WebUI only.
Still stuck? Ask the community
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