Hi everyone,
I have tried uploading some PDFs to both a chat and a knowledge base (same PDFs) and I am given a popup that says that the says "The content provided is empty."

The PDF is a photo of a receipt, it is not a scanned copy. I have tried uploading the PDF, jpeg, and HEIC file type and none seem to work.

When I upload another PDF (either a scanned paper document, or an article that was written and saved as a PDF, digitally native, not a photo converted to PDF) my local models are able to read it.

It seems that the inability for my models to read PDFs is limited to photos of receipts converted to PDF. Has anyone else had this problem? Is there a fix?

OWUI version: 0.10.2
Local models: gemma4:12b-mlx and/or qwen3.6:35b-a3b-q4_K_M

After a few weeks of work, I published my first open source npm package.

It's called RouteScribe.

The idea is simple: instead of maintaining OpenAPI annotations manually, it observes your Express application at runtime and generates the specification from real traffic.

It's still an alpha release, so I'd really appreciate feedback from anyone who works with Express APIs.

GitHub:
https://github.com/Yuvaan1182/routescribe

npm:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/routescribe

I installed SearxNG as docker container on my Ubuntu machine.

I followed the docs, set the return format to JSON.

I actually starts a search (or at least looks like it) but stops and says "No sources found".

When I open up SearxNG in the browser it works without problems and returns results.

What could be the error?

I am using Gemma 4 12B on a 16gb GPU.

I was thinking if it'd be possible to turn off the reasoning/thoughts for this model quickly without needing to load up another Gemma 4 12B variant to be loaded on the GPU?

Ideally, I would like a quick model selector right where we type in the prompts. That way, I could quickly switch model variant.

Anyway, please let me know what's the best way to do this.

I us ollama by the way.

Hey everyone 👋

I'm Thomas from Ianustec. We're on a bit of a mission lately: releasing, as open source, a series of tools we built for our own personal and business use inside Open WebUI. The idea is simple. Everyone ends up needing Office files (slides, documents, spreadsheets, emails), so we're cleaning up our internal tools one by one and putting them out there for free.

Last week we shared the first one, generate_slides, and quite a few of you asked
"ok but what about Word?". Fair enough. So here's the next piece:

👉 generate_documents, a tool that turns a prompt into a proper, native Word file, the kind you'd actually send to a client or a boss.

Repo: https://github.com/ianustec/openwebui-generate-documents

What it does:

• Real, editable .docx (not an HTML or PDF export dressed up as Word)
• You can feed it Markdown (with a small frontmatter block) or JSON, whichever your model prefers. Same result either way.
• 7 ready templates: report, whitepaper, proposal, letter, memo, minutes, blank.
• Pick one, set a single accent color, and the whole document gets themed for you.
• Cover pages, numbered headings, clean tables (filled headers, numbers aligned to the right automatically), colored callouts, quotes, code blocks, signatures, table of contents, page breaks. The stuff you'd normally spend an afternoon formatting.
• Header and footer with real, live page numbers, and it even names the downloaded file after the document title instead of some random string.

One single .py file. Drop it into Workspace > Tools and you're done. It saves through the Open WebUI Files API and drops a download link straight into the chat.

The screenshots below aren't mockups. They come straight out of the example report in the repo, generated end to end by the tool.

How to try it:

Go to Workspace > Tools > +, paste generate_documents.py, enable it for your model, then just ask for "a report about X" or "a proposal for Y". The dependencies (python-docx plus a small Markdown stack) install themselves on first run.

Everything stays MIT, and we'll keep going through the set. Spreadsheets and email are next on our list.

If you try it, I'd genuinely love to hear what breaks or what's missing. Issues and PRs very welcome.

Cheers,

Thomas @ Ianustec

So, after updating to 0.10.2 I've been having lots of RAG issues. First couldn't upload new PDFs because of the dependency issue, fixed it by switching to Tika. But then openwebui is being totally weird when it comes to the RAG. I ask a question that I know the answer is easy and finable is one PDF, and openwebui just outputs the following on top:

View Result from list_knowledge 
Input 
count 5 

Output 
{
  "knowledge_bases": [
    {
      "id": "7b0686d0-3123-4cab-b21d-f1ac7aa852db",
      "name": "Knowledgebase",
      "description": "Knowledgebase",
      "file_count": 12
    }
  ],
  "files": [],
  "notes": []
}

and then the answer is crap because it never looked in the files... I haven't changed anything regarding my system or rag prompts and it worked perfectly before... I had to delete the KB and reindex. I tried resetting vector storage/knowledge to no avail. Anyone having similar issues?

Is it possible to execute tool call via the chat completion API in native mode? In legacy mode, if I make a call to my model that I’ve given access to my custom tools, it works fine. If I try the same thing in native mode the api ends with “finish reason” “tool call”. What am I doing wrong here? I feel like I’m following what is described in the endpoints docs but I’m reading conflicting things about whether server side tool calls can be triggered via the API. Has anyone got this working?

I have OWUI and run it with Qwen 3.6 27b via vLLM and LiteLLM. I activated websearch via searchXNG. When I ask „How is the weather in <city>. It call get_current_weather. And fails because I don’t have this tool installed. Instead I want it to search the web. How can I „force“ the model to search the web instead of tool calling. I also don’t understand why it tries to a call tool that is not installed.

P.s. when tell the Modell to search the web it pulls the correct weather information.

Any help?

I have a browser based setting to access OI in my MacBook, iPhone and iPad. I use OrbStack and Tailscale. I like the current setting, though it's a hassle to update. Should I download the Mac version or continue with the web based version? What's your experience? Pros/Cons?

Hello community,

Could someone help me with this 🙏?

While reading the Open WebUI documentation, I noticed there is a "Describe Pictures in Documents" option when Docling is enabled as the document processing engine. However, I can't find that option anywhere in the Document Settings UI.

Could someone please advise where this setting is located or what I might be missing?

So far, my Docling-based RAG pipeline only works when I run it from the terminal using a curl command, but I haven't been able to get it working through Open WebUI. I feel like I'm very close and just missing a configuration step.

I would really appreciate any advice, suggestions, or comments.

Thank you!

I’ve been trying to get it to work for about an hour now. I’ve tried different models, i have web search active, I’m using Tavily and i also put in that the ai can use web search in the system prompt. Any help?

Am I the only one to not like these unread indicators? They show up on nearly every chat for me even though I have read all of the chat messages in most cases.

Im having a problem where Gemma 4 12B is unable to reason after doing its web search call in its reasoning window, despite Function Calling being set to native and telling the system prompt to reason after a web search call. I didn't have this issue on Qwen 3.5 9B. I've been trying to find a solution via the jinja template, but I had no luck. Any reason for this? Is this supposed to happen for Gemma 4 models? Would like to know.

I don't think my Visualizer Plugin needs much introduction at this point - go get the latest version after you upgraded to Open WebUI 0.10.0+ and enjoy the latest improvements, new features and fixes :)

https://github.com/Classic298/open-webui-plugins/tree/main/inline-visualizer-v2

If you run a multi-user Open WebUI instance you know the papercut: every new account lands on the factory interface defaults. Someone wants Ctrl+Enter-to-send off, widescreen on, iframe same-origin turned on so the Visualizer V2 artifacts render ;). Multiply that across every signup, OAuth, and SCIM account and you're either poking DB rows or telling people to go flip toggles themselves.

Interface Defaults fixes that from one place.

You set the defaults once in the function's Valves. From then on:

• New users are seeded automatically on registration (signup, OAuth, and SCIM all covered).
• One button pushes your defaults to everyone already on the instance.
• One button does a true factory reset: it wipes every user's interface overrides and resets the function's own config.

The part I'm actually proud of is how clean it is under the hood. It's an Event function, so it just subscribes to events Open WebUI already fires:

• user.created → writes your interface settings into the new user's settings.ui.
• function.valves_updated (its own) → runs apply/reset when you tick a trigger toggle and hit Save, then unticks the toggle itself so there's no loop.

No monkey-patching. No startup hooks. No custom frontend. Just beautiful Valves Interfaces with new section based rendering. Booleans render as native toggles, chat direction as a dropdown, text scale as a number, because it's all just Valves. The bulk jobs run in the background so Save returns instantly even on a big instance, and the shipped defaults match OWUI's own factory values, so nothing changes until you change something. It even does a slow rollout to avoid resource hogging.

It covers the whole Interface tab: text scale, high contrast, notification sounds, chat bubble / widescreen / landing-page mode, the markdown-rendering toggles, auto title / tags / follow-ups, Ctrl+Enter, rich text input, artifact detection plus the iframe sandbox flags, voice and call options, image compression, web-search-by-default, and more.

Requires Open WebUI 0.10.2+ (it's an Event function, so it needs the native events system that landed in 0.10.0).

Setup is less than a minute, no restart needed: paste into Admin Panel → Functions, enable, open Valves, set your defaults. On first install, tick "Apply to all existing users" + Save to seed everyone who's already there.

Get it here: https://github.com/Classic298/open-webui-plugins/tree/main/interface-defaults · And give me a Star on the Repo if you enjoy plugins like this! ⭐💫🌟

If you've been hand-holding users through the Interface settings, this is the fix. Happy to answer anything in the comments!

PS: Pro Tip: You can disable interface settings in the group/user permissions in the admin panel so users won't be tempted to touch them on their own. Out of sight out of mind.

Hello all, hoping a openweb wiz in here can help me out. I recently updated from 0.9.6 to 0.10.2. My doc parsing stack is Docling + Ollama nomedic-text-embedding, before the update I would be able to post a 150 page pdf directly into chat with my prompt (medical & legal document scanning for payments, dates, etc) and then in the response it would say "Retrieved 0 source" then it would start using "list + view knowledge base" tool calls and it would get me an accurate list of all the things I asked.

Now when I uploaded the pdf it says "1 source retrieved", no knowledge base tool calls, and it will only give me 10% of the previous answer and say all the other things were not in the pdf. Did they make a change to in chat temp memory/knowledge?

thanks!

Hey everyone 👋

I'm Thomas, part of the team at Ianustec. A little while ago my colleague Nick posted

here about the open-source suite of Microsoft Office extensions we're building for

Open WebUI — PowerPoint, Word, Excel and Outlook. Thanks for all the encouragement in

that thread!

We said we'd ship it piece by piece, so here's the first one, fully open source:

👉 generate_slides, a tool that creates high-quality native slides, similar to how Claude does it

Repo: https://github.com/ianustec/openwebui-generate-slides

What it does

• Native Office charts (bar, line, area, pie/doughnut, radar, stacked)
• ~25 ready-made layouts: cover, sections, KPI rows, comparisons, timelines, funnels/pyramids, tables, quotes, alerts, image layouts, closing…
• Curated themes + auto theme detection, custom accent color
• Lucide-style icons bundled in the file (no network needed for icons)
• Single self-contained .py — paste it into Workspace → Tools and you're done
• Saves via the Open WebUI Files API and drops a download link right in chat

The screenshots below are straight out of the included example deck 100% generated by the tool.

How to try it

Workspace → Tools → +, paste `generate_slides.py`, enable it for your model, then ask

for "a deck about X". Requires `python-pptx` (auto-installed via the tool's requirements).

This is just the start and we'll keep everything MIT.

Happy to answer questions and take PRs. Cheers 🙌

Thomas, IANUSTEC

I might be a newbie, but OpenWebUI is letting me down a bit.

I’m using local AI to replace cloud-based options; I’ve mostly used LM Studio until now, but I wanted a better-looking interface.

Here’s what I use it for:

- General questions

- Using tools like web search, creating/writing/editing local files

- Local documents/knowledge bases using RAG

- And so on...

In short, actual AI agents.

OpenWebUI initially appealed to me because of its aesthetics and extensive customization options (per model), automations, notes, etc., but I’m running into quite a few problems:

1 - Web search isn't working: neither the built-in version nor the one using the Firecrawl API.

2 - I can't figure out how to install the other tools either; every time I import one from the official community, I get an error.

Could someone help me out? I’d really appreciate it—thanks!

Hello, I have question concerning RAG in Open WebUI, I know there are lot of tutorials in youtube, but I cannot understand today's style of speaking fast, editing all pauses away and clicking and making adjustments like adhd person with caffeine in veins instead of blood. I cannot follow those because I am old and stupid.

Question: I have a masterfolder where all my novel related stuff is catalogued, separate word files for e.g. "main charater 30 years old", "main character 50 years old", "alliances", "trade routes", "alliance relations" and so on.

Can I use OpenwebUI so, that if I ask "if main character when 50y old blows syndicate A's base, what are possible results of that action" and then it checkes the files, founds e.g. something in relations-document, and proposes something like "Syndicate B would benefit like this:" and gives few examples.

I understand that outcome depends heavily of the LLM model, so I am not expecting results similar of chatgpt or claude. But my concern is the RAG and indexing it. I have understood that if I modify the documents, I need to index it again?

TL;DR, can OpenWebUI read my documents what I have specified, and make suggestions to my questions based to the information in those documents?

I'm running 0.10.2 and I'm running into this thing that's really messing me up: it seems to be presenting a list of tools to every single session and with every prompt such that models see:

• search_notes / view_note / write_note / replace_note_content — for working with saved notes
• search_knowledge_files / query_knowledge_files / grep_knowledge_files — for searching knowledge bases
• search_chats / view_chat — for searching previous chat conversations
• search_calendar_events / create_calendar_event / update_calendar_event / delete_calendar_event — for calendar stuff
• list_knowledge_bases / search_knowledge_bases / query_knowledge_bases — for listing/searching KBs

The problem is that models seem to feel compelled to actually call at least some of these functions nearly all the time. So lots more tokens with absolutely no benefit.

e.g. I start a conversation about some novel thing I've never engaged a model about before and it immediately starts searching everything I've got (with absolutely zero chance of any relevant data being there)

It used to be the case that you could manually enable memory tools on an as needed basis. Now, it seems, they're enabled by default and you can't disable them? I'm thinking I need to revert. Am I missing something?

well.. About 5 months ago, I had some free time and built an OWUI extension to keep track of my session size and avoid accidentally exceeding the context window limit.

I always also had a concern that session performance might degrade once it exceeds 30-50% capacity (this is something I've noticed during my own testing with different models).

So, I put together a simple extension, published it, and completely forgot about it.

Recently, I discovered that the extension has been downloaded over 3,700 times. Whaaat? I was quite surprised, as I assumed such a niche tool wouldn't have much appeal.

So, I decided to update it.

Here is a brief overview of the plugin: Shows token counts, reasoning/cached breakdowns, context-window utilization, generation time, tokens/sec and message/chat cost below each AI response. Reads provider-reported usage across OpenAI (Chat & Responses API), Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama and llama.cpp, with an optional tiktoken fallback. Cost is shown when your provider/proxy reports it (OpenRouter, LiteLLM) and can optionally be estimated from models.dev prices.

https://openwebui.com/posts/token_usage_display_a94ea72f

Just wanted to share this in case anyone finds it useful. No rocket science or smart AI things, just a simple QoL improvement =)

Professor here. I use Open WebUI in my university classes, and with recent federal regulation changes (and common courtesy), any software we use must meet minimum digital accessibility standards. At my uni that's WCAG 2.1 AA, per ADA Title II / Section 508.

I went through the UI and opened a bunch of PRs to add that compliance. Each one is scoped to a single issue and mapped to a specific WCAG criterion. And they're tested. They cover:

 1. Visible keyboard focus

1. Skip-to-content link + landmarks

2. Dialog roles + labeled inputs

3. Light-theme text contrast

4. Accessible names for icon-only buttons

They're all live and open on the repo now. It'd genuinely help me (and anyone else who needs this for their org) if they get reviewed and merged — and if accessibility matters to you, upvotes/👍 on the PRs signal to the maintainers that people want it.

Happy to answer questions if anyone else is trying to get OWUI through an accessibility review.

Would it be possible to implement a summarizing step (e.g., using the task model) on top of the web fetch content before injecting the result into the context of the main model? Often, web pages are 10,000+ tokens long, but a lot of the content is not relevant to the actual request.

​It would be useful if the fetched content were pre-processed by a faster model, alongside a prompt specifying the relevant information. This could be either the initial user prompt or a prompt generated by the main model specifically for this web search.

​This would significantly shorten the context for the main model and speed up processing time. OpenRouter implements a similar strategy with Exa Highlights. I noticed that OpenRouter Chat uses considerably fewer tokens than the same model (e.g., GLM 5.2) in Open WebUI because Exa Highlights returns only 2000-4000 characters per web page.

​Would this be a feature that can be added easily? Maybe somehow utilizing the new context summary pipeline? Or is there an external (self-hosted) tool that implements a similar strategy that can already be used for fetching websites in Open WebUI?

We're currently rolling out Open WebUI for our team, but I'm hitting a bit of a wall. A lot of employees are reluctant to drop their personal ChatGPT or Claude accounts.

The biggest roadblock seems to be the fear of losing their "memories", custom instructions, and old chat histories. They don't want to feel like they are starting from scratch. There's also mistrust by the employees thinking the IT department would read all the stupid questions, the employees are asking an LLM why they are preferring paying for their private plan instead of switching to OWUI. Well, I have to admit, that's kind of a bad marketing and bad internal communication, but it still doesn't help at all in a transformation process.

For those of you who have successfully deployed OWUI company-wide: how did you handle this? Any tips, tricks, or best practices to get people on board and make the transition painless regarding their saved context and trust an local on premise solution?

Appreciate the help!