Ollama model discovery

How OpenClaw discovers Ollama models implicitly, plus narrow smoke tests

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:

Behavior	Detail
Catalog query	`/api/tags`
Capability detection	Best-effort `/api/show` reads `contextWindow`, `num_ctx` Modelfile parameters, and capabilities (vision/tools/thinking)
Vision models	A `vision` capability from `/api/show` marks the model image-capable (`input: ["text", "image"]`)
Reasoning detection	Uses the `thinking` capability from `/api/show` when available; falls back to a name heuristic (`r1`, `reason`, `reasoning`, `think`) when Ollama omits capabilities. `glm-5.2:cloud`, `glm-5.3:cloud`, `glm-5.3-flash:cloud`, `kimi-k3:cloud`, `deepseek-v4-flash\|pro:cloud`, and `deepseek-v4.1-flash:cloud` are always treated as reasoning regardless of reported capabilities.
Token limits	`maxTokens` defaults to OpenClaw's Ollama max-token cap
Costs	All costs are `0`

ollama list
openclaw models list

When Ollama is in the agent's model scope, an explicit self-hosted endpoint is discovered even when models.providers.ollama.models lists models, as setup saves them. Configured models keep their settings; other installed chat models appear beside them, so a model pulled later shows up on the next model-list refresh without a config edit or restart. To list only configured models, set models.mode: "replace" or plugins.entries.ollama.config.discovery.enabled: false. 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 check 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 check (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. These are contributor commands: run them from a checkout of the openclaw/openclaw repository with pnpm install already done, not from a packaged CLI install.

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