Open WebUI frontend

Chat with Arka in Open WebUI. The launcher locks chat to the arka model and turns on DuckDuckGo web search by default.

arka frontend open-webui starts Open WebUI with an OpenAI-compatible bridge to your Arka agent. Use it when you want a browser chat interface for Arka without running the React web dashboard.

Prerequisites

• REMOTE_TOKEN set in ~/.config/arka/.env. The bridge uses it to authenticate with arka serve.
• Docker running, or Open WebUI installed with pip install open-webui (Python 3.11+).

Launch

arka frontend open-webui --open

Arka starts the agent backend if it isn’t running. Then it starts the bridge and Open WebUI. Arka uses Docker when it’s available. Otherwise, pass --pip to use a pip install.

Flag	Default	Purpose
--port	3000 (Docker), 8080 (pip)	Open WebUI port
--bridge-port	8769	OpenAI bridge port
--host	127.0.0.1	Bridge listen host
--docker	on when Docker is running	Run Open WebUI in Docker
--pip	off	Run Open WebUI from a pip install
--open	off	Open the browser after starting

Focused defaults

The launcher configures Open WebUI so every conversation stays on Arka:

• Single model. arka is the only model. The Ollama API is off.
• No Arena picker. Arena evaluation models are turned off.
• No chat Controls. The chat Controls panel is hidden.
• No follow-up suggestions. Follow-up generation is off.
• Web search on. Web search is enabled with DuckDuckGo.

Web search settings

Override the web search defaults with environment variables before you launch:

Variable	Default	Purpose
ENABLE_WEB_SEARCH	true	Turn Open WebUI web search on or off
WEB_SEARCH_ENGINE	duckduckgo	Search engine Open WebUI uses

ENABLE_WEB_SEARCH=false arka frontend open-webui

Chat behavior

Web chat tries a small local Ollama model first, then falls back to Gemini and Groq. See Web chat model order.

Short acknowledgments such as “thanks”, “ok great”, or “got it” get a brief welcome. Arka doesn’t continue the previous build or send more code.