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Providers & connections

Loach talks to providers over HTTP. When the model dropdown is empty or every request fails, the problem is almost always reachability, authentication or key storage.

Ollama is installed but Loach can’t see it

The Providers panel says Ollama isn’t reachable, or the model dropdown is empty even though ollama list works in a terminal.

  1. Make sure ollama serve is running. On Windows, the Ollama tray icon needs to be active; on Linux, the ollama service must be started.
  2. Open Settings → Providers → Ollama and check the Base URL. The default is http://localhost:11434. If you run Ollama on another machine or a custom port, change it here.
  3. Click Refresh in the Models tab. The list re-queries Ollama’s /api/tags endpoint.
  4. If Ollama runs on another host, make sure its firewall allows inbound connections on the chosen port and that OLLAMA_HOST=0.0.0.0 is set on the server side (Ollama binds to localhost by default).

OpenAI says “invalid key” or returns 401

You added an OpenAI-compatible API key but every request fails with 401.

  1. Re-enter the key in Settings → Providers → OpenAI. Keys are stored in the operating system’s credential store, not on disk, so a copy-paste that picked up a trailing space will silently fail.
  2. Confirm the key is active on your OpenAI dashboard and has not been rotated.
  3. If you’re using a custom OpenAI-compatible endpoint (vLLM, LM Studio, LiteLLM, OpenRouter, Groq), make sure the Base URL ends with /v1 and that the endpoint accepts the same Authorization: Bearer … header the real OpenAI API uses.

Key won’t save on Linux

The OpenAI-compatible API key field clears every time you reopen Settings, or saving the key throws an error.

Loach uses the system Secret Service to store secrets. On minimal Linux installs (server-style, some tiling window managers) there is no Secret Service running.

  1. Install and start gnome-keyring or KWallet — whichever fits your desktop environment.
  2. Make sure a login session is unlocked so the keyring is available to user processes.
  3. Restart Loach and re-enter the key.

Models list shows no models

Ollama is reachable but the list is empty.

You haven’t pulled any models yet. In the Models tab, click Pull a model, type a tag (for example llama3.1:8b), and wait for the download to finish. The list refreshes automatically.

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