Accessing Your Setup From Other Devices on Your Network

Why this matters

Everything up to this point has assumed you're sitting at the machine running Ollama and Open WebUI, typing into localhost. That's fine for setup, but it's not how anyone actually wants to use a chat interface day to day.

You want it from the couch, from bed, from your laptop in another room.

By default, Open WebUI only listens on the machine it's installed on - the setup guide's install command deliberately binds it to 127.0.0.1, not your network address. That's the safe starting point, and this guide is about the step of consciously opening it up.

Opening it up

Widening the binding means recreating the container with a different port mapping. Your chat history and settings are untouched by this - they live in a separate Docker volume, not the container itself:

docker rm -f open-webui
docker run -d -p 3000:8080 --add-host=host.docker.internal:host-gateway -v open-webui:/app/backend/data --name open-webui --restart always ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:main

The only change from the original install command is dropping 127.0.0.1: from the port mapping - 3000:8080 instead of 127.0.0.1:3000:8080. That single difference is what makes it reachable on your network instead of just this machine. If you're on Docker Compose, it's the same change to one line in the file, then docker compose up -d again.

Finding your local IP

On the machine running Open WebUI, find its address on your home network:

# Linux
hostname -I

# Mac
ipconfig getifaddr en0

On Windows, open Command Prompt and run ipconfig, then look for the "IPv4 Address" under your active network adapter. You're looking for something in the form 192.168.x.x or 10.0.x.x.

Connecting from another device

From your phone or laptop, on the same Wi-Fi network, open a browser and go to:

http://192.168.1.XXX:3000

Replace the address with the actual IP you found, keeping :3000 on the end - that's the port Open WebUI listens on. You should see the same login screen and chat interface as on the host machine.

Only ever need this at home? This is genuinely enough. Want it working when you're not on the same Wi-Fi at all - away from home, on a different network entirely? Access Your Local AI From Anywhere Without Exposing It to the Internet covers that safely, without opening anything to the public internet.

What actually goes wrong

The page times out instead of loading

This is almost always a firewall blocking the port on the host machine, not a networking mistake. On Linux with UFW:

sudo ufw allow 3000/tcp

On Mac, check System Settings → Network → Firewall and confirm it isn't blocking incoming connections for Docker. On Windows, check Windows Defender Firewall's allowed apps list.

Your phone says it's connected to Wi-Fi but still can't reach it

Confirm both devices are actually on the same network, not just both on "Wi-Fi." Guest networks are commonly isolated from the main network by design, specifically so guest devices can't reach anything else on it - if your router has a separate guest SSID, connect your phone to the main one instead.

The IP address stopped working after a while

The machine's local IP likely changed after a router restart. Re-run the IP lookup command from above to get the current address, or set up a static IP reservation in your router settings so this stops happening.

Common questions