How does Spring AI support the Ollama provider for local model development?

Ollama is an open-source tool that downloads and runs large language models locally on your machine — no API key, no internet connection required once the model is downloaded. Spring AI's Ollama integration makes local model development as seamless as using a cloud provider: the same ChatClient, EmbeddingModel, and Advisor abstractions work identically.

Setup involves running the Ollama server and pulling a model:

brew install ollama         # macOS
ollama serve               # starts the local API server at http://localhost:11434
ollama pull llama3         # download Llama 3 (4-8 GB depending on quantisation)
ollama pull nomic-embed-text  # download an embedding model

Spring Boot configuration:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.ai</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-ai-ollama-spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
</dependency>

spring.ai.ollama.base-url=http://localhost:11434
spring.ai.ollama.chat.options.model=llama3
spring.ai.ollama.embedding.options.model=nomic-embed-text

Ollama supports chat, embeddings, and streaming. For CI environments, Testcontainers provides an OllamaContainer that downloads and starts an Ollama Docker container with a specified model as part of the test lifecycle — enabling fully automated, offline AI integration tests without any external API credentials:

@Container
static OllamaContainer ollama = new OllamaContainer("ollama/ollama:latest")
    .withModel("phi3:mini");

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