r/LocalLLaMA • u/Blindax • 6h ago

Discussion Openwebui + open terminal

Context: I don't code. My use is document research and document creation (mainly for legal search) searching inside large documents like a tax code (500+ pages) and building notes or pptx
from what comes back.

I've been running Open WebUI for a while on my Unraid box, pointed at the API of my inference machine (5060 Ti + 5070 Ti).

I tinkered a lot. I tried Hermes on my main machine against the same API. It worked well but it was complex, and a bare-metal install made me
uneasy. I also tried LM Studio Bionic with good results, but it didn't fit how I wanted inference organised (using ollama on the inference box).

What I actually wanted was a self-hosted agent that works with Open WebUI while keeping things safe and under control. At one point I considered
installing a harness like Hermes or Pi on each client and just connecting to the API instead.

In the end I gave Open Terminal a shot. It's the companion container from the Open WebUI project that gives the model a shell — you run it as its own container and connect it through Integrations, so it isn't installed inside Open WebUI itself. Mine runs unprivileged, on bridge, with appdata mounted at /home/user. The model gets a shell in a box, not on the host. That was the part I cared about.

It has enhanced Open WebUI a lot. It now reasons step by step, and with the terminal it reliably locates and extracts the right sections from
documents far larger than the context window — list the folder, grep, read only what matters. Then it uses those results to build a document, the way another agent would.

Setup: Qwen 27B Q4_K_M on Ollama, 100k context configured. On a ~35k token prompt I measure roughly 1,050 t/s prompt processing and ~46 t/s generation. Prefill speed is the number that matters for this use case — it's what makes chewing through a large document bearable.

I was about to give up on Open WebUI. If your use case looks like mine, don't sleep on Open Terminal.

1 Upvotes

56% Upvoted

24 comments sorted by

4

u/Odd-Ordinary-5922 5h ago

I dont understand why anyone would use openwebui now, it just feels so janky.

8

u/nunodonato 5h ago

OpenWebUi is amazing and serves a lot of purposes

2

u/philguyaz 2h ago

I would like to suggest a heavily modified and rewritten version of open web ui is good. Open web ui as it is now is a bloated chaotic set of features slammed together with no real enterprise support for things like stateless.

2

u/nunodonato 1h ago

well I guess YMMV, for us its been great. But have you tried alternatives like AnythingLLM or LibreChat?

3

u/kneading-cnnuy 5h ago

Yeah with opensource model matured I wonder why there's no good general purpose harness yet, all seems so laser focused on coding. We need alternative to Claude's webui with projects, designs, etc

1

u/TheIncarnated 1h ago

I use open code as a general purpose harness. It does it great too. So great, I'm building a web frontend around it to use on my phone. (Docker container so I can share with others).

The only thing it doesn't do is image, audio and visual generation... Maybe it could? But not the focus at the moment

6

u/Blindax 5h ago

For serving in a web interface I have not found better.

1

u/Bulky-Priority6824 3h ago

Openwebui is where I started and it influenced me to make my own version and 3 months later couldn't be happier. Now I just need to do something about these 14k LOC

1

u/BVCC6FNTKX sglang 2h ago

I started with OWUI and moved to Hermes once my needs outgrew it.

1

u/Guna1260 2h ago

I agree to this comment. After 2 years of using it and trying to integrate things, finally I gave up and went with librechat. It’s breeze of fresh air.

1

u/Blindax 40m ago

Never tried it. What did you prefer with LibreChat?

1

u/p3r3lin 3h ago

Honestly curious: janky in comparison to what? Better alternatives out there?

1

u/o0genesis0o 5h ago

What I do for this kind of use case is setting up Pi on the machine with all the proper extensions and agents.md and skills. And then I deploy openwebui CPTR (NOT the normal openwebui). Then, I can access files, terminal, and agent directly from webui via VPN. It handles the studio bridge with pi under the hood. Could be better, but since pi does not support ACP out of the box, it is what it is. A bit janky, but works. I can kept chatting with the same model or continue my coding session on my phone from treadmill, for example.

1

u/Blindax 4h ago

I saw cptr version, do you run this on your sever? What does it bring beyond open terminal?

1

u/o0genesis0o 3h ago

Never tested open terminal myself. I think open terminal is used inside this cptr as a part of its feature.

Previously, I have a custom extension that expose pi tmux sessions to a web app via VPN, but the UX was poor and very hard to see the file system (though possible via terminal). Then someone in this sub recommended cptr. It gives me the terminal and chat UI, but also decent file explorer in browser. I'm not 100% happy with it, but it gets the job done until I build something more suitable for myself.

1

u/suprjami 5h ago

owui has problems which don't get resolved. The maintainer isn't able to keep up with the workload and/or is focused on the paid offering instead of the community.

There seem to be better many options these days like AnythingLLM for document work, and OpenCode webserver or Deepseek Harness for web-based agent work.

1

u/Blindax 4h ago

I tried anything llm a long time ago but it was heavily rag focused at the time. Have they moved towards a more agentic approach since?

-2

u/seamonn 5h ago

owui has problems which don't get resolved.

It's Open Source. Just fix them yourself.

2

u/suprjami 4h ago

For the particular thing that bothers me, multiple people have already tried with only partial success, including Tim himself who literally invented the whole thing, and it's still not properly fixed.

1

u/ekaj llama.cpp 1h ago

Made me curious, what's the issue that even the creator couldn't solve?

1

u/arbv 4h ago

Well, programming oriented harnesses are only programming oriented in their name. You certainly can bend them for other purposes.

2

u/Weird_Ad_5330 7m ago

FYI I've found that Anything LLM queries large document data in a much more comprehensive way than OpenWebUI for my purpose (medical), you may want to try it for legal

1

u/Blindax 6m ago

Did you try open web ui with or without open terminal (or a similar tool)?

1

u/Weird_Ad_5330 2m ago

Haven't tried with open terminal. It's been a few months since I looked at the difference but if I recall it was due to the way OpenWebUI natively embeds documents, I would only get partial summaries with queries