Introduction - Ollama

Ollama's API allows you to run and interact with models programatically.

Get started

If you're just getting started, follow the quickstart documentation to get up and running with Ollama's API.

Base URL

After installation, Ollama's API is served by default at:

http://localhost:11434/api

For running cloud models on ollama.com, the same API is available with the following base URL:

https://ollama.com/api

Example request

Once Ollama is running, its API is automatically available and can be accessed via curl:

shell

curl http://localhost:11434/api/generate -d '{
  "model": "gemma3",
  "prompt": "Why is the sky blue?"
}'

Libraries

Ollama has official libraries for Python and JavaScript:

Python
JavaScript

Several community-maintained libraries are available for Ollama. For a full list, see the Ollama GitHub repository.

Versioning

Ollama's API isn't strictly versioned, but the API is expected to be stable and backwards compatible. Deprecations are rare and will be announced in the release notes.