feat: localai assistant chat modality#9602
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…moval The previous reorg removed tests/models_fixtures/ but core/config/model_test.go still read CONFIG_FILE/MODELS_PATH env vars pointing into that directory, so `make test` failed with "open : no such file or directory" on the readConfigFile spec (the suite ran with --fail-fast and bailed before openresponses_test). Inline the YAMLs (config/embeddings/grpc/rwkv/whisper) directly into the test file, materialise them into a per-test tmpdir via BeforeEach, and drop the env-var lookups. The test no longer depends on Makefile plumbing. Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> Assisted-by: claude-code:claude-opus-4-7 [Edit] [Write] [Bash]
Lift the bodies of EditModelEndpoint, PatchConfigEndpoint, ToggleStateModelEndpoint, TogglePinnedModelEndpoint and VRAMEstimateEndpoint into core/services/modeladmin so the same logic can be called by non-HTTP clients (notably the in-process MCP server that backs the LocalAI Assistant chat modality, landing in a follow-up commit). The HTTP handlers shrink to thin shells that parse echo inputs, call the matching helper, map typed errors (ErrNotFound, ErrConflict, ErrPathNotTrusted, ErrBadAction, ...) to the existing HTTP status codes, and render the existing response shapes. No REST-surface behaviour change; the existing localai endpoint tests cover the regression net. Adds focused unit tests for each helper against tmp-dir-backed ModelConfigLoader fixtures (deep-merge patch, rename + conflict, path separator guard, toggle/pin enable/disable, sync callback). Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Read] [Edit] [Write] [Bash] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
…erver
Adds a chat modality, admin-only, that wires the chat session to an
in-memory MCP server exposing LocalAI's own admin/management surface as
tools. An admin can install models, manage backends, edit configs and
check status by chatting; the LLM calls tools like gallery_search,
install_model, import_model_uri, list_installed_models, edit_model_config
and surfaces the results.
Same Go package powers two modes:
pkg/mcp/localaitools/
NewServer(client, opts) builds an MCP server that registers the
19-tool admin catalog. The LocalAIClient interface has two impls:
- inproc.Client — calls services directly (no HTTP loopback,
no synthetic admin API key). Used in-process by the chat handler.
- httpapi.Client — calls the LocalAI REST API. Used by the new
`local-ai mcp-server --target=…` subcommand to control a remote
LocalAI from a stdio MCP host.
Tools and their embedded skill prompts are agnostic to which client
backs them. Skill prompts are markdown files under prompts/, embedded
via go:embed and assembled into the system prompt at server init.
Wiring:
- core/http/endpoints/mcp/localai_assistant.go — process-wide holder
that spins up the in-memory MCP server once at Application start
using paired net.Pipe transports, then reuses LocalToolExecutor
(no fork) for every chat request that opts in.
- core/http/endpoints/openai/chat.go — small branch ahead of the
existing MCP block: when metadata.localai_assistant=true,
defense-in-depth admin check + executor swap + system-prompt
injection. All downstream tool dispatch is unchanged.
- core/http/auth/{permissions,features}.go — adds
FeatureLocalAIAssistant; gating happens at the chat handler entry
plus admin-only `/api/settings`.
- core/cli/{run.go,cli.go,mcp_server.go} —
LOCALAI_DISABLE_ASSISTANT flag (runtime-toggleable via Settings, no
restart), plus `local-ai mcp-server` stdio subcommand.
- core/config/runtime_settings.go — `localai_assistant_enabled`
runtime setting; the chat handler reads `DisableLocalAIAssistant`
live at request entry.
UI:
- Home.jsx — prominent self-explanatory CTA card on first run
("Manage LocalAI by chatting"); collapses to a compact
"Manage by chat" button in the quick-links row once used,
persisted via localStorage.
- Chat.jsx — admin-only "Manage" toggle in the chat header,
"Manage mode" badge, dedicated empty-state copy, starter chips.
- Settings.jsx — "LocalAI Assistant" section with the runtime
enable toggle.
- useChat.js — `localaiAssistant` flag on the chat schema; injects
`metadata.localai_assistant=true` on requests when active.
Distributed mode: the in-memory MCP server lives only on the head node;
inproc.Client wraps already-distributed-aware services so installs
propagate to workers via the existing GalleryService machinery.
Documentation: `.agents/localai-assistant-mcp.md` is the contributor
contract — when adding an admin REST endpoint, also add a LocalAIClient
method, an inproc + httpapi impl, a tool registration, and a skill
prompt update; the AGENTS.md index links to it.
Out of scope (follow-ups): per-tool RBAC granularity for non-admin
read-only access; streaming mcp_tool_progress for long installs;
React Vitest rig for the UI changes.
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Read] [Edit] [Write] [Bash]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
The MCP tool surface, capability tag set, server-name default, and the chat-handler metadata key were repeated as bare string literals across seven files. Renaming any one required hand-editing every call site and risked code/test/prompt drift. This pulls them into typed constants: - pkg/mcp/localaitools/tools.go — Tool* constants for the 19 MCP tools, plus DefaultServerName. - pkg/mcp/localaitools/capability.go — typed Capability + constants for the capability tag set the LLM passes to list_installed_models. The type rides through LocalAIClient.ListInstalledModels and replaces the triplet of "embed"/"embedding"/"embeddings" with the single CapabilityEmbeddings. - pkg/mcp/localaitools/inproc/client.go — bytesPerMiB constant for the VRAMEstimate byte→MB conversion. - core/http/endpoints/mcp/tools.go — MetadataKeyLocalAIAssistant for the "localai_assistant" request-metadata key consumed by the chat handler. Tool registrations, the test catalog, the dispatch table, the validation fixtures, and the fake/stub clients all reference the constants. The embedded skill prompts under prompts/ keep their bare strings (go:embed markdown can't import Go constants); the existing TestPromptsContain SafetyAnchors guards the alignment. No behaviour change. All tests pass with -race. Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Read] [Edit] [Write] [Bash] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
The toggle/pin verbs were bare strings everywhere — handler signatures, service implementations, MCP tool args, the fake/stub clients, the inproc and httpapi LocalAIClient impls, plus 4 test files. A typo in any caller silently fell through to the runtime "must be 'enable' or 'disable'" check. Introduce core/services/modeladmin.Action (string alias) with ActionEnable, ActionDisable, ActionPin, ActionUnpin and a small Valid helper. The compiler now catches mismatches at every boundary; renames ripple through one source of truth. LocalAIClient.ToggleModelState/Pinned signatures change to take modeladmin.Action. The package is brand-new and unreleased so this is a free public-API tightening. Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Read] [Edit] [Bash] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
InstallModel, DeleteModel, ImportModelURI, InstallBackend and UpgradeBackend all pushed onto galleryop channels with bare sends. If the worker was paused or the buffer full, the chat-handler goroutine blocked forever — the LLM kept polling and the request leaked. Wrap the five sends in a sendModelOp/sendBackendOp helper that selects on ctx.Done() so a cancelled chat completion surfaces context.Canceled back to the LLM instead of hanging. Adds inproc/client_test.go with a pre-cancelled-ctx regression test on InstallModel; the helpers are shared so the same guarantee covers the other four call sites. Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Edit] [Write] [Bash] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Two related leaks: - Application.start() built the LocalAIAssistantHolder but never wired Close() into the graceful-termination chain — the in-memory MCP transport pair stayed alive until process exit, and the goroutines behind net.Pipe() didn't drain. Hook into the existing signals.RegisterGracefulTerminationHandler chain (same pattern as core/http/endpoints/mcp/tools.go:770). - core/cli/mcp_server.go ran srv.Run with context.Background(); a Ctrl-C from the host (Claude Desktop, mcphost, npx inspector) or a SIGTERM from process supervision left the stdio loop reading from a closed pipe. Switch to signal.NotifyContext to surface the signal through ctx and let srv.Run drain. Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Read] [Edit] [Bash] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
The httpapi client detected "no such job" by substring-matching on the
error string ("404", "could not find") — brittle to status-code
formatting changes and to LocalAI fixing /models/jobs/:uuid to return a
proper 404. Replace with a typed *HTTPError whose Is() method honours
errors.Is(err, ErrHTTPNotFound). The 500-with-"could not find" branch
stays as a transitional fallback documented in Is().
Same change covers ListNodes' 404 fallback for the /api/nodes endpoint.
Adds httptest tests for both 404 and the legacy 500 path, plus a
direct errors.Is exposure test so external callers (the standalone
stdio CLI host) can match without re-string-parsing.
Also tightens prompts.SystemPrompt: panic when fs.WalkDir on the
embedded FS fails. The only realistic cause is a build-time //go:embed
misconfiguration; serving an empty system prompt to the LLM is much
worse than crashing init. TestSystemPromptIncludesAllEmbeddedFiles
catches regressions in CI.
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Edit] [Write] [Bash]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
The five sites that wrote model YAML used os.WriteFile, which opens with O_TRUNC|O_WRONLY|O_CREATE. A crash mid-write left the destination truncated and the model unloadable until manual repair. Pre-existing behaviour inherited from the original endpoint handlers — fix once now that there's a single helper. Adds writeFileAtomic: writes to a sibling temp file, chmods, syncs via Close(), then os.Rename. Same-directory temp keeps the rename atomic on the same filesystem; cleanup runs on every error path so stray temps don't accumulate. No new dependency. Applied to: - ConfigService.PatchConfig - ConfigService.EditYAML (both rename and in-place branches) - mutateYAMLBoolFlag (drives ToggleState + TogglePinned) atomic_test.go covers the happy path plus a read-only-dir failure case that asserts the original file is preserved (skipped on Windows where the chmod trick is POSIX-specific). Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Edit] [Write] [Bash] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Three small cleanups landing together: - Drop the unused errNotImplemented sentinel from inproc/client.go. All five methods that used to return it are wired to modeladmin helpers since the Phase B commit; the package var is dead. - Annotate httpapi.Client.GetModelConfig as a known stub. LocalAI's /models/edit/:name returns rendered HTML, not JSON, so the standalone CLI's get_model_config tool surfaces a clear error to the LLM. A future JSON-only /api/models/config-yaml/:name endpoint is tracked in the agent contract; FIXME points at it. - Extend `.agents/localai-assistant-mcp.md` with a "Code conventions" section that documents the audit-driven rules: tool/Capability/Action constants, errors.Is over substring matching, ctx-aware channel sends, atomic writes, and graceful shutdown. Refresh the file map so it lists tools.go and capability.go and drops the removed tools_bootstrap.go. The tools_models.go diff is a comment-only change explaining why the ModelName empty-string check stays at the tool layer (consistency across LocalAIClient implementations, since the SDK schema validator only enforces presence, not non-empty). Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Read] [Edit] [Bash] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
The repo convention (per core/http/endpoints/localai/*_test.go,
core/gallery/**, etc.) is Ginkgo v2 with Gomega assertions. The tests I
introduced for the assistant feature used vanilla testing.T, which made
them stand out and stripped the BDD structure the rest of the suite
relies on.
Convert every test file in the assistant scope to Ginkgo:
pkg/mcp/localaitools/
dto_test.go — Describe("DTOs round-trip through JSON")
prompts_test.go — Describe("SystemPrompt assembler")
server_test.go — Describe("Server tool catalog"),
Describe("Tool dispatch"),
Describe("Tool error surfacing"),
Describe("Argument validation"),
Describe("Concurrent tool calls")
parity_test.go — Describe("LocalAIClient parity"),
hosts the suite's single RunSpecs (the file
is package localaitools_test so it can
import httpapi without an import cycle;
Ginkgo aggregates Describes from both the
internal and external test packages into
one run).
httpapi/client_test.go — Describe("httpapi.Client against the
LocalAI admin REST surface"),
Describe("ErrHTTPNotFound"),
Describe("Bearer token")
inproc/client_test.go — Describe("inproc.Client cancellation")
core/services/modeladmin/
config_test.go — Describe("ConfigService") with sub-Describes
for GetConfig, PatchConfig, EditYAML
state_test.go — Describe("ConfigService.ToggleState")
pinned_test.go — Describe("ConfigService.TogglePinned")
atomic_test.go — Describe("writeFileAtomic")
core/http/endpoints/mcp/
localai_assistant_test.go — Describe("LocalAIAssistantHolder")
Each package gets a `*_suite_test.go` with the standard
`RegisterFailHandler(Fail) + RunSpecs(t, "...")` boilerplate. Helpers
that previously took *testing.T (newTestService, writeModelYAML,
readMap, sortedStrings, sortGalleries, etc.) drop the *T receiver and
use Gomega Expectations directly. tmp dirs come from GinkgoT().TempDir().
No semantic change to test coverage — every original assertion has a
direct Gomega counterpart. All suites pass with -race.
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Read] [Edit] [Write] [Bash]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Honest gap from the audit: the parity_test.go suite only checks four methods, and uses the same httpapi.Client for both sides — it asserts stability of the DTO shapes, not equivalence between in-process and HTTP. If a contributor adds an admin REST endpoint without an MCP tool, or a tool without a matching httpapi route, both surfaces silently diverge. Add a coverage test plus stronger docs: - pkg/mcp/localaitools/coverage_test.go introduces a hand-maintained toolToHTTPRoute map: every Tool* constant must list the REST endpoint the httpapi.Client hits (or "(none)" with a documented reason). Two Ginkgo specs assert the map and the published catalog stay in sync — one fails when a Tool is added without a route entry, the other fails when a route entry references a tool that no longer exists. Verified by removing the ToolDeleteModel entry locally; the test fired with a clear message pointing the contributor at the file. Deliberate non-test: we don't enumerate live admin REST routes from here. Walking the route registry requires booting Application; parsing core/http/routes/localai.go is brittle. The "new admin REST endpoint → MCP tool" direction stays a PR checklist item — see below. - AGENTS.md gets a new Quick Reference bullet that calls out the rule and points at the test by name. - .agents/api-endpoints-and-auth.md tightens the existing "Companion: MCP admin tool surface" subsection from "if useful, consider..." to "MUST be considered, with three concrete outcomes (tool added, deliberately skipped with documented reason, or forgot — which breaks the contract)". Adds a checklist item at the bottom of the file's authoritative checklist. Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Read] [Edit] [Write] [Bash] Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
richiejp
reviewed
Apr 28, 2026
Audit feedback: localaitools/dto.go reinvented several types that already
existed in the codebase. Replace the duplicates with the canonical types
so the LLM-visible wire format stays aligned with the rest of LocalAI by
construction (no parallel structs to keep in sync).
Removed (and the canonical type now used by the LocalAIClient interface):
localaitools.Gallery → config.Gallery
localaitools.GalleryModelHit → gallery.Metadata
localaitools.VRAMEstimate → vram.EstimateResult
Tightened scope:
localaitools.Backend → kept, but reduced to {Name, Installed}.
ListKnownBackends now returns
[]schema.KnownBackend (the canonical
type already used by REST /backends/known).
Kept with documented rationale:
localaitools.JobStatus — galleryop.OpStatus has Error error which
marshals to "{}". JobStatus is the
JSON-friendly mirror.
localaitools.Node — nodes.BackendNode carries gorm internals
+ token hash; we expose only the
LLM-relevant fields.
ImportModelURIRequest/Response — schema.ImportModelRequest and
GalleryResponse are wire-shaped, mine
are LLM-shaped (BackendPreference flat,
AmbiguousBackend exposed).
Side wins:
- Drop bytesPerMiB; vram.EstimateResult already carries human-readable
display strings (size_display, vram_display) the LLM uses directly.
- Drop the handler-private vramEstimateRequest in
core/http/endpoints/localai/vram.go and bind directly into
modeladmin.VRAMRequest (now JSON-tagged).
Both clients pass through these types now where possible (e.g.
ListGalleries in inproc.Client is a one-liner returning
AppConfig.Galleries; httpapi.Client.GallerySearch decodes straight into
[]gallery.Metadata).
All tests green with -race.
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Read] [Edit] [Bash]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
httpapi.Client had 18 bare-string path sites scattered across methods. Pull them into pkg/mcp/localaitools/httpapi/routes.go: static paths as package-private constants, dynamic paths as small builders that handle url.PathEscape on segment values. No behaviour change. Drops the now-unused net/url import from client.go since path escaping moved into routes.go alongside the path it applies to. Local-only by design: the server-side registrations in core/http/routes/localai.go remain bare strings. Sharing constants across the pkg/ ↔ core/ boundary would invert the layering today; the existing Tool↔REST drift-detector in coverage_test.go is the safety net for that direction. Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Claude Code]
The LocalAI Assistant doc still described the older iteration: - The in-chat toggle was renamed from "Admin" to "Manage" (the badge is now "Manage mode" and the home page exposes a "Manage by chat" CTA). - LOCALAI_ASSISTANT_BOOTSTRAP_MODEL / --localai-assistant-bootstrap-model and the bootstrap_default_model tool were removed — admins pick a model from the existing selector instead, no env-var configuration required. - The shipped tool catalog includes import_model_uri but didn't appear in the doc; bootstrap_default_model appeared but no longer exists. - The Settings → LocalAI Assistant runtime toggle wasn't mentioned as the preferred way to disable without restart. Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-7 [Claude Code]
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Description
This PR adds an MCP server in LocalAI for LocalAI itself, and wires that in the UI so the user can control and manage LocalAI from the chat interface.