Ollama REST API Tutorial: Integrate Local AI into Any App in 2026

#ai #2026 #machinelearning #java

This is a summary of the full tutorial published on howtostartprogramming.in.

TL;DR Get a local LLM up and running with Ollama, expose its /api/chat REST endpoint, and call it from any application in just a few lines of code. Step Command / Code What it does 1⃣ Install Ollama curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh Downloads and installs the latest Ollama binary for your OS. 2⃣ Pull a model ollama pull llama3.2:latest Downloads the chosen LLM (e.g., Llama 3.2) into Ollama’s local cache. 3⃣ Enable the REST API ollama serve --port 11434 Starts a local HTTP server listening on http://localhost:11434 . 4⃣ Send a chat request fetch('http://localhost:11434/api/chat', { method: 'POST', headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' }, body: JSON.stringify({ model: 'llama3.2', messages: [{ role: 'user', content: 'Explain quantum tunneling in 2 sentences.' }], stream: f