Ollama Launch

Ollama provides local LLM inference for RLM distillation (seal phase summarization) and embeddings.

When You Need This

• Seal fails with Connection refused to 127.0.0.1:11434
• RLM distillation shows [DISTILLATION FAILED] for new files
• Any tool that calls the Ollama API locally

Pre-Flight Check

# Check if Ollama is already running
curl -sf http://127.0.0.1:11434/api/tags > /dev/null && echo "✅ Ollama running" || echo "❌ Ollama not running"

If running, you're done. If not, proceed.

Start Ollama

# Start Ollama in the background
ollama serve &>/dev/null &

# Wait and verify (2-3 seconds)
sleep 3
curl -sf http://127.0.0.1:11434/api/tags > /dev/null && echo "✅ Ollama ready" || echo "❌ Ollama failed to start"

Verify Model Available

For RLM distillation, the project uses model you define in .env

# List available models
ollama list

# If the model is missing, pull it
ollama pull qwen2:7b

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Fix
Connection refused after start	Wait longer (sleep 5), model may be loading
ollama: command not found	Ollama not installed — ask user to install from https://ollama.com
Port 11434 already in use	Another process on that port — lsof -i :11434 to identify

Integration Points

• Learning Loop Seal Phase: RLM synthesis calls Ollama for distillation
• RLM Factory: /rlm-factory:distill requires Ollama for batch summarization
• Embeddings: Any tool that needs local vector embeddings