Multi-user installation for Ollama on MacOS

[davidrpugh]

Trying to help my university IT install Ollama in such a way that it can be distributed via the IT self-service installation process which uses Jamf Pro.

Looks like this might already be possible. Seems that when trying to run the installer inside /Applications folder the installer succeeds but then upon first use by a user, the user is prompted to install the command line interface and asked to provide admin password. Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

[hingstarne]

As far as i can see, if you install it with homebrew its pretty close to what you are looking for formula Add a user to the mac os system, install homebrew and install ollama with it. Afterwards you can start the service with brew services start ollama If you need it auto start on bootime you need to manage it via the plist of launchtl

[neilmartin83]

Heya - adding my voice to this.

Homebrew is really not an option for classroom computers:

• Homebrew allows standard users to install other tools/software and this is considered a high risk in many environments that have managed computers, especially education
• Computers in edu environments are often shared so users log in with their own separate accounts - brew doesn't accommodate that - it's designed for computers with one user and sets its ownership/permissions based on them
• Users in education classroom environments are not local administrators

Is there any action we can take with management tooling to perform the tasks that would normally require local admin elevation? I.e. create/copy over/link etc any files required for Ollama to function?

Thank you.

[paul-cossey]

Hi, folks

Also adding my voice here too.

It's easy enough to create an alias for the CLI in /usr/local/bin I've knocked up a quick post install scrip that handles this

#!/bin/bash

# Script built from: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/851#issuecomment-1889808636

# Install Command Line Tools
if ! [ -f /usr/local/bin/ollama ]; then
  /usr/bin/touch /usr/local/bin/ollama ; /bin/ln -s -f /Applications/Ollama.app/Contents/Resources/ollama /usr/local/bin/ollama
fi

exit

The issue with deploying via any kind MDM (Jamf etc) or a tool like Munki is that the options to set the 1st time run is located in the users home folder. As these tools all run as root it's not possible set "first-time-run": true in the ~/Library/Application Support/Ollama/config.json file

Would you consider adding the ability to set that key somewhere that is accessible to all users of a computer?

A couple of options

• Preference domain/Config Profile
• /Library/Application Support/Ollama/config.json
• /Users/Shared/Ollama/config.json (my least preferred option as this folder could get cleared out periodically)

Another potential option would be to allow the install CLI windows to closed.

Thanks for your consideration, this would really help out folks that want to centrally deploy your software.