I’ve spend almost a week, on and off, trying to install ollama using Nix in such a way that ollama serve will be run and managed automatically in the background.
Initially, I had tried to install ollama via home-manager.
This was straightforward, but finding a way to have ollama serve run automatically so that I didn’t need to do it myself every time I wanted to interact with or pull a model.
This need send me down that macOS rabbithole of launch agents/daemons and plists.
The macOS-specific nature of this research could have tipped me off that this was a job for nix-darwin rather than home-manager.
Eventually, I tried installing ollama via nix-darwin and it seemed to Just Work.
I still haven’t been able to figure out where it’s running ollama serve from.
❯ grep -l 'ollama' ~/Library/LaunchAgents/* /Library/LaunchAgents/* /Library/LaunchDaemons/* /System/Library/LaunchAgents/* /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/*
# nothing
Nix-darwin appears to have several options for configuring launch agents that I may need to return to if this behavior doesn’t persist across a restart.
I learn about this game by Neal a little while and I love it. I think it’s a language-model-based craft game. Something like a game I played a long time ago called “Alchemy”.