open-tui

About

open-tui is a terminal application aiming to provide a similar user experience to Open WebUI... but in the terminal. Tired of context switching back and forth between your browser? Then this is the TUI for you! open-tui currently supports:

• Model selection: Change which LLM you are using on the fly
• Chat selection: Switch back and forth between different chats to preserve context. Create new chats.
• Sync Chats: By piggybacking off of Open WebUI, all of your chats made inside open-tui are shared with your Open WebUI session.

Note

Requires a running instance of Open WebUI. To get started with Open WebUI, visit their docs.

Download/Usage

To install globally:

npm i -g open-tui

then run

open-tui

open-tui requires two environment variables to function:

• OPENTUI_WEBUI_HOST: IP/Domain name of your Open WebUI instance (Example http://192.168.68.50:4000)
• OPENTUI_WEBUI_TOKEN: Can be found under Account -> API Keys

export them via export VARIABLE_NAME=value (preferably in your .zshrc to persist across your terminal sessions). For a list of all environment variables see below.

Environment Variable	Type	Description
OPENTUI_WEBUI_TOKEN	string	Authentication token for OpenTUI WebUI.
OPENTUI_WEBUI_HOST	string	The WebUI server host URL.
OPENTUI_LOG (optional)	string	Path to the log file.
OPENTUI_APPEND_LOG (optional)	string	Whether to append to the log file (true/false).

Note

Using a program like Tailscale can allow secure access to your locally running services and it's pretty easy to setup!

Install locally

Requirements

• Bun

git clone https://github.com/ZachJW34/open-tui.git && \
cd open-tui && \
bun i && \
bun run dev

Further improvements

Open WebUI is a feature packed application so I don't expect this TUI to ever have featuer parity with it. Nonetheless, I'd like to expand upon it so as to limit the amount of times I have to switch to the web version. This could be:

• Multiline prompt support: Currently annoying to only be able to input on one continuous line without line breaks
• Respect Open WebUI user settings: Templates, variables etc..
• Delete chats
• Regenerate/modify responses
• File upload support
• Multi-model response
• Theming
• a whole lot more...
• Add tests

Currently, it scratches the itch of being able to quickly pull up an LLM while developing. Plus, TUIs just feel and look cool.

Contributing

Contributors welcome! Feel free to fork and create a PR.