Ollama model discovery

Model discovery (implicit provider)

When OLLAMA_API_KEY (or an auth profile) is set and neither models.providers.ollama nor another custom provider with api: "ollama" is defined, OpenClaw discovers models from http://127.0.0.1:11434:

ollama listopenclaw models list

A nonempty models.providers.ollama.models list selects manual models and skips discovery. When Ollama is in the agent's model scope, an explicit self-hosted endpoint with models: [] remains eligible for discovery; models.providers.ollama.apiKey alone does not select that provider for Gateway model browsing.

Failed discovery records an unavailable or catalog-authentication failure and keeps the last successful inventory for the same endpoint and credentials. A successful empty response clears discovered models. Manual models stay separate.

Hosted https://ollama.com entries skip discovery because Ollama Cloud models are provider-managed. Without an explicit Ollama endpoint, a custom provider with api: "ollama" and a non-loopback baseUrl suppresses ambient localhost discovery; list that custom provider's models manually (see Configuration). Loopback custom providers such as http://127.0.0.2:11434 keep ambient local discovery eligible.

You can use a full ref such as ollama/<pulled-model>:latest without a hand-written models.json entry; OpenClaw resolves it live. For signed-in hosts, selecting an unlisted ollama/<model>:cloud ref validates that exact model with /api/show and adds it to the runtime catalog only if Ollama confirms metadata — typos still fail as unknown models.

Smoke tests

For a narrow text probe that skips the full agent tool surface:

OLLAMA_API_KEY=ollama-local \  openclaw infer model run \    --local \    --model ollama/llama3.2:latest \    --prompt "Reply with exactly: pong" \    --json

Add --file with an image for a lean vision-model probe (accepts PNG/JPEG/WebP; non-image files are rejected before Ollama is called — use openclaw infer audio transcribe for audio):

OLLAMA_API_KEY=ollama-local \  openclaw infer model run \    --local \    --model ollama/qwen2.5vl:7b \    --prompt "Describe this image in one sentence." \    --file ./photo.jpg \    --json

Neither path loads chat tools, memory, or session context. If it succeeds while normal agent replies fail, the issue is likely the model's tool/agent capacity, not the endpoint.

Selecting a model with /model ollama/<model> is an exact user choice: if the configured baseUrl is unreachable, the next reply fails with the provider error instead of silently falling back to another configured model.

Isolated cron jobs add one local safety check before starting the agent turn: if the selected model resolves to a local/private-network/.local Ollama provider and /api/tags is unreachable, OpenClaw records that run as skipped with the model in the error text. This endpoint check is cached for 5 minutes per host, so repeated cron jobs against a stopped daemon do not all launch failing requests.

Live verification:

OPENCLAW_LIVE_TEST=1 OPENCLAW_LIVE_OLLAMA=1 OPENCLAW_LIVE_OLLAMA_WEB_SEARCH=0 \  pnpm test:live -- extensions/ollama/ollama.live.test.ts

For Ollama Cloud, point the same live test at the hosted endpoint (skips embeddings by default; force with OPENCLAW_LIVE_OLLAMA_EMBEDDINGS=1 since a cloud key may not authorize /api/embed):

export OLLAMA_API_KEY='<your-ollama-cloud-api-key>'OPENCLAW_LIVE_TEST=1 OPENCLAW_LIVE_OLLAMA=1 \OPENCLAW_LIVE_OLLAMA_BASE_URL=https://ollama.com \OPENCLAW_LIVE_OLLAMA_MODEL=glm-5.1:cloud \OPENCLAW_LIVE_OLLAMA_WEB_SEARCH=1 \pnpm test:live -- extensions/ollama/ollama.live.test.ts

To add a model, pull it and it is discovered automatically:

ollama pull mistral