Ollama Service Won't Start

Read the actual error before trying anything

On Linux, the install script sets Ollama up as a systemd service. Check its real status instead of guessing:

sudo systemctl status ollama

For the actual error output, not just the status summary:

journalctl -e -u ollama

On Mac, check the Ollama app's menu bar icon - if it's not there, open the app fresh from Applications and watch for an error dialog. On Windows, check whether the Ollama process appears in Task Manager, and look for an error when launching the app directly.

The most common cause: something else is already using the port

Ollama's API listens on port 11434. If another process already has that port, Ollama fails to start rather than picking a different one. Check what's using it:

# Linux/Mac
sudo lsof -i :11434

On Windows, check the Resource Monitor's network tab, or Task Manager's "Details" view for a process holding that port. If you find an old, stuck Ollama process, end it and try starting the service again.

Other things worth checking

• A restart clears more than it should have to. sudo systemctl restart ollama resolves a surprising number of "won't start" cases that are actually "got into a bad state and needs a clean restart," not a real configuration problem.
• Permissions, if you've manually moved anything. The Linux install creates a dedicated ollama system user - if you've manually moved model files or changed OLLAMA_MODELS to point somewhere that user can't read, the service can fail to start with a permissions error buried in the journal output above.
• A corrupted install after an interrupted update. If the service worked before an update and stopped afterward, re-running the official install command is safe and won't touch your downloaded models: curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh. If models still don't show up afterward, see A Model Disappeared After an Update - it's almost always a path issue, not lost data.