llama.cpp

Manifesto / ggml / ops

LLM inference in C/C++

Recent API changes

Hot topics

Hugging Face cache migration: models downloaded with -hf are now stored in the standard Hugging Face cache directory, enabling sharing with other HF tools.
guide : using the new WebUI of llama.cpp
guide : running gpt-oss with llama.cpp
[FEEDBACK] Better packaging for llama.cpp to support downstream consumers 🤗
Support for the gpt-oss model with native MXFP4 format has been added | PR | Collaboration with NVIDIA | Comment
Multimodal support arrived in llama-server: #12898 | documentation
VS Code extension for FIM completions: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.vscode
Vim/Neovim plugin for FIM completions: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.vim
Hugging Face Inference Endpoints now support GGUF out of the box! https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/9669
Hugging Face GGUF editor: discussion | tool

Quick start

Getting started with llama.cpp is straightforward. Here are several ways to install it on your machine:

Install llama.cpp using brew, nix or winget
Run with Docker - see our Docker documentation
Download pre-built binaries from the releases page
Build from source by cloning this repository - check out our build guide

Once installed, you'll need a model to work with. Head to the Obtaining and quantizing models section to learn more.

Example command:

# Use a local model file
llama-cli -m my_model.gguf

# Or download and run a model directly from Hugging Face
llama-cli -hf ggml-org/gemma-3-1b-it-GGUF

# Launch OpenAI-compatible API server
llama-server -hf ggml-org/gemma-3-1b-it-GGUF

Description

The main goal of llama.cpp is to enable LLM inference with minimal setup and state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of hardware - locally and in the cloud.

Plain C/C++ implementation without any dependencies
Apple silicon is a first-class citizen - optimized via ARM NEON, Accelerate and Metal frameworks
AVX, AVX2, AVX512 and AMX support for x86 architectures
RVV, ZVFH, ZFH, ZICBOP and ZIHINTPAUSE support for RISC-V architectures
1.5-bit, 2-bit, 3-bit, 4-bit, 5-bit, 6-bit, and 8-bit integer quantization for faster inference and reduced memory use
Custom CUDA kernels for running LLMs on NVIDIA GPUs (support for AMD GPUs via HIP and Moore Threads GPUs via MUSA)
Vulkan and SYCL backend support
CPU+GPU hybrid inference to partially accelerate models larger than the total VRAM capacity

The llama.cpp project is the main playground for developing new features for the ggml library.

<details> <summary>Models</summary>

Typically finetunes of the base models below are supported as well.

Instructions for adding support for new models: HOWTO-add-model.md

Text-only

Multimodal

</details> <details> <summary>Bindings</summary>

Python: ddh0/easy-llama
Python: abetlen/llama-cpp-python
Go: go-skynet/go-llama.cpp
Node.js: withcatai/node-llama-cpp
JS/TS (llama.cpp server client): lgrammel/modelfusion
JS/TS (Programmable Prompt Engine CLI): offline-ai/cli
JavaScript/Wasm (works in browser): tangledgroup/llama-cpp-wasm
Typescript/Wasm (nicer API, available on npm): ngxson/wllama
Ruby: yoshoku/llama_cpp.rb
Rust (more features): edgenai/llama_cpp-rs
Rust (nicer API): mdrokz/rust-llama.cpp
Rust (more direct bindings): utilityai/llama-cpp-rs
Rust (automated build from crates.io): ShelbyJenkins/llm_client
C#/.NET: SciSharp/LLamaSharp
C#/VB.NET (more features - community license): LM-Kit.NET
Scala 3: donderom/llm4s
Clojure: phronmophobic/llama.clj
React Native: mybigday/llama.rn
Java: kherud/java-llama.cpp
Java: QuasarByte/llama-cpp-jna
Zig: deins/llama.cpp.zig
Flutter/Dart: netdur/llama_cpp_dart
Flutter: xuegao-tzx/Fllama
PHP (API bindings and features built on top of llama.cpp): distantmagic/resonance (more info)
Guile Scheme: guile_llama_cpp
Swift srgtuszy/llama-cpp-swift
Swift ShenghaiWang/SwiftLlama
Delphi Embarcadero/llama-cpp-delphi
Go (no CGo needed): hybridgroup/yzma
Android: llama.android

</details> <details> <summary>UIs</summary>

(to have a project listed here, it should clearly state that it depends on llama.cpp)

AI Sublime Text plugin (MIT)
BonzAI App (proprietary)
cztomsik/ava (MIT)
Dot (GPL)
eva (MIT)
iohub/collama (Apache-2.0)
janhq/jan (AGPL)
johnbean393/Sidekick (MIT)
KanTV (Apache-2.0)
KodiBot (GPL)
llama.vim (MIT)
LARS (AGPL)
Llama Assistant (GPL)
LlamaLib (Apache-2.0)
LLMFarm (MIT)
LLMUnity (MIT)
LMStudio (proprietary)
LocalAI (MIT)
LostRuins/koboldcpp (AGPL)
MindMac (proprietary)
MindWorkAI/AI-Studio (FSL-1.1-MIT)
Mobile-Artificial-Intelligence/maid (MIT)
Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile (Apache-2.0)
nat/openplayground (MIT)
nomic-ai/gpt4all (MIT)
ollama/ollama (MIT)
oobabooga/text-generation-webui (AGPL)
PocketPal AI (MIT)
psugihara/FreeChat (MIT)
ptsochantaris/emeltal (MIT)
pythops/tenere (AGPL)
ramalama (MIT)
semperai/amica (MIT)
withcatai/catai (MIT)
Autopen (GPL)

</details> <details> <summary>Tools</summary>

akx/ggify – download PyTorch models from Hugging Face Hub and convert them to GGML
akx/ollama-dl – download models from the Ollama library to be used directly with llama.cpp
crashr/gppm – launch llama.cpp instances utilizing NVIDIA Tesla P40 or P100 GPUs with reduced idle power consumption
gpustack/gguf-parser - review/check the GGUF file and estimate the memory usage
Styled Lines (proprietary licensed, async wrapper of inference part for game development in Unity3d with pre-built Mobile and Web platform wrappers and a model example)
unslothai/unsloth – 🦥 exports/saves fine-tuned and trained models to GGUF (Apache-2.0)

</details> <details> <summary>Infrastructure</summary>

Paddler - Open-source LLMOps platform for hosting and scaling AI in your own infrastructure
GPUStack - Manage GPU clusters for running LLMs
llama_cpp_canister - llama.cpp as a smart contract on the Internet Computer, using WebAssembly
llama-swap - transparent proxy that adds automatic model switching with llama-server
Kalavai - Crowdsource end to end LLM deployment at any scale
llmaz - ☸️ Easy, advanced inference platform for large language models on Kubernetes.
LLMKube - Kubernetes operator for llama.cpp with multi-GPU and Apple Silicon Metal support"

</details> <details> <summary>Games</summary>

Lucy's Labyrinth - A simple maze game where agents controlled by an AI model will try to trick you.

</details>

Supported backends

Backend	Target devices
Metal	Apple Silicon
BLAS	All
BLIS	All
SYCL	Intel and Nvidia GPU
OpenVINO [In Progress]	Intel CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs
MUSA	Moore Threads GPU
CUDA	Nvidia GPU
HIP	AMD GPU
ZenDNN	AMD CPU
Vulkan	GPU
CANN	Ascend NPU
OpenCL	Adreno GPU
IBM zDNN	IBM Z & LinuxONE
WebGPU [In Progress]	All
RPC	All
Hexagon [In Progress]	Snapdragon
VirtGPU	VirtGPU APIR

Obtaining and quantizing models

The Hugging Face platform hosts a number of LLMs compatible with llama.cpp:

You can either manually download the GGUF file or directly use any llama.cpp-compatible models from Hugging Face or other model hosting sites, by using this CLI argument: -hf <user>/<model>[:quant]. For example:

llama-cli -hf ggml-org/gemma-3-1b-it-GGUF

By default, the CLI would download from Hugging Face, you can switch to other options with the environment variable MODEL_ENDPOINT. The MODEL_ENDPOINT must point to a Hugging Face compatible API endpoint.

After downloading a model, use the CLI tools to run it locally - see below.

llama.cpp requires the model to be stored in the GGUF file format. Models in other data formats can be converted to GGUF using the convert_*.py Python scripts in this repo.

The Hugging Face platform provides a variety of online tools for converting, quantizing and hosting models with llama.cpp:

Use the GGUF-my-repo space to convert to GGUF format and quantize model weights to smaller sizes
Use the GGUF-my-LoRA space to convert LoRA adapters to GGUF format (more info: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/10123)
Use the GGUF-editor space to edit GGUF meta data in the browser (more info: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/9268)
Use the Inference Endpoints to directly host llama.cpp in the cloud (more info: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/9669)

To learn more about model quantization, read this documentation

`llama-cli`

A CLI tool for accessing and experimenting with most of `llama.cpp`'s functionality.

<details open> <summary>Run in conversation mode</summary>

Models with a built-in chat template will automatically activate conversation mode. If this doesn't occur, you can manually enable it by adding -cnv and specifying a suitable chat template with --chat-template NAME

llama-cli -m model.gguf

# > hi, who are you?
# Hi there! I'm your helpful assistant! I'm an AI-powered chatbot designed to assist and provide information to users like you. I'm here to help answer your questions, provide guidance, and offer support on a wide range of topics. I'm a friendly and knowledgeable AI, and I'm always happy to help with anything you need. What's on your mind, and how can I assist you today?
#
# > what is 1+1?
# Easy peasy! The answer to 1+1 is... 2!

</details>

<details> <summary>Run in conversation mode with custom chat template</summary>

# use the "chatml" template (use -h to see the list of supported templates)
llama-cli -m model.gguf -cnv --chat-template chatml

# use a custom template
llama-cli -m model.gguf -cnv --in-prefix 'User: ' --reverse-prompt 'User:'

</details>

<details> <summary>Constrain the output with a custom grammar</summary>
```
llama-cli -m model.gguf -n 256 --grammar-file grammars/json.gbnf -p 'Request: schedule a call at 8pm; Command:'

# {"appointmentTime": "8pm", "appointmentDetails": "schedule a a call"}
```
The grammars/ folder contains a handful of sample grammars. To write your own, check out the GBNF Guide.

For authoring more complex JSON grammars, check out https://grammar.intrinsiclabs.ai/
</details>

`llama-server`

A lightweight, OpenAI API compatible, HTTP server for serving LLMs.

<details open> <summary>Start a local HTTP server with default configuration on port 8080</summary>

llama-server -m model.gguf --port 8080

# Basic web UI can be accessed via browser: http://localhost:8080
# Chat completion endpoint: http://localhost:8080/v1/chat/completions

</details>

<details> <summary>Support multiple-users and parallel decoding</summary>

# up to 4 concurrent requests, each with 4096 max context
llama-server -m model.gguf -c 16384 -np 4

</details>

<details> <summary>Enable speculative decoding</summary>

# the draft.gguf model should be a small variant of the target model.gguf
llama-server -m model.gguf -md draft.gguf

</details>

<details> <summary>Serve an embedding model</summary>

# use the /embedding endpoint
llama-server -m model.gguf --embedding --pooling cls -ub 8192

</details>

<details> <summary>Serve a reranking model</summary>

# use the /reranking endpoint
llama-server -m model.gguf --reranking

</details>

<details> <summary>Constrain all outputs with a grammar</summary>

# custom grammar
llama-server -m model.gguf --grammar-file grammar.gbnf

# JSON
llama-server -m model.gguf --grammar-file grammars/json.gbnf

</details>

`llama-perplexity`

A tool for measuring the perplexity ¹ (and other quality metrics) of a model over a given text.

<details open> <summary>Measure the perplexity over a text file</summary>

llama-perplexity -m model.gguf -f file.txt

# [1]15.2701,[2]5.4007,[3]5.3073,[4]6.2965,[5]5.8940,[6]5.6096,[7]5.7942,[8]4.9297, ...
# Final estimate: PPL = 5.4007 +/- 0.67339

</details>

<details> <summary>Measure KL divergence</summary>
```
# TODO
```
</details>

`llama-bench`

Benchmark the performance of the inference for various parameters.

<details open> <summary>Run default benchmark</summary>

llama-bench -m model.gguf

# Output:
# | model               |       size |     params | backend    | threads |          test |                  t/s |
# | ------------------- | ---------: | ---------: | ---------- | ------: | ------------: | -------------------: |
# | qwen2 1.5B Q4_0     | 885.97 MiB |     1.54 B | Metal,BLAS |      16 |         pp512 |      5765.41 ± 20.55 |
# | qwen2 1.5B Q4_0     | 885.97 MiB |     1.54 B | Metal,BLAS |      16 |         tg128 |        197.71 ± 0.81 |
#
# build: 3e0ba0e60 (4229)

</details>

`llama-simple`

A minimal example for implementing apps with `llama.cpp`. Useful for developers.

<details> <summary>Basic text completion</summary>

llama-simple -m model.gguf

# Hello my name is Kaitlyn and I am a 16 year old girl. I am a junior in high school and I am currently taking a class called "The Art of

</details>

Contributing

Contributors can open PRs
Collaborators will be invited based on contributions
Maintainers can push to branches in the llama.cpp repo and merge PRs into the master branch
Any help with managing issues, PRs and projects is very appreciated!
See good first issues for tasks suitable for first contributions
Read the CONTRIBUTING.md for more information
Make sure to read this: Inference at the edge
A bit of backstory for those who are interested: Changelog podcast

XCFramework

The XCFramework is a precompiled version of the library for iOS, visionOS, tvOS, and macOS. It can be used in Swift projects without the need to compile the library from source. For example:

// swift-tools-version: 5.10
// The swift-tools-version declares the minimum version of Swift required to build this package.

import PackageDescription

let package = Package(
    name: "MyLlamaPackage",
    targets: [
        .executableTarget(
            name: "MyLlamaPackage",
            dependencies: [
                "LlamaFramework"
            ]),
        .binaryTarget(
            name: "LlamaFramework",
            url: "https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/releases/download/b5046/llama-b5046-xcframework.zip",
            checksum: "c19be78b5f00d8d29a25da41042cb7afa094cbf6280a225abe614b03b20029ab"
        )
    ]
)

The above example is using an intermediate build b5046 of the library. This can be modified to use a different version by changing the URL and checksum.

Completions

Command-line completion is available for some environments.

Bash Completion

$ build/bin/llama-cli --completion-bash > ~/.llama-completion.bash
$ source ~/.llama-completion.bash

Optionally this can be added to your .bashrc or .bash_profile to load it automatically. For example:

$ echo "source ~/.llama-completion.bash" >> ~/.bashrc

Dependencies

yhirose/cpp-httplib - Single-header HTTP server, used by llama-server - MIT license
stb-image - Single-header image format decoder, used by multimodal subsystem - Public domain
nlohmann/json - Single-header JSON library, used by various tools/examples - MIT License
miniaudio.h - Single-header audio format decoder, used by multimodal subsystem - Public domain
subprocess.h - Single-header process launching solution for C and C++ - Public domain

https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/perplexity ↩

ggerganov/llama.cpp

llama.cpp

Recent API changes

Hot topics

Quick start

Description

Text-only

Multimodal

Supported backends

Obtaining and quantizing models

`llama-cli`

A CLI tool for accessing and experimenting with most of `llama.cpp`'s functionality.

`llama-server`

A lightweight, OpenAI API compatible, HTTP server for serving LLMs.

`llama-perplexity`

A tool for measuring the perplexity ¹ (and other quality metrics) of a model over a given text.

`llama-bench`

Benchmark the performance of the inference for various parameters.

`llama-simple`

A minimal example for implementing apps with `llama.cpp`. Useful for developers.

Contributing

Other documentation

Development documentation

Seminal papers and background on the models

XCFramework

Completions

Bash Completion

Dependencies

Tags

Timeline

Verification Status

Embed Badge

ggerganov/llama.cpp

llama.cpp

Recent API changes

Hot topics

Quick start

Description

Text-only

Multimodal

Supported backends

Obtaining and quantizing models

llama-cli

A CLI tool for accessing and experimenting with most of llama.cpp's functionality.

llama-server

A lightweight, OpenAI API compatible, HTTP server for serving LLMs.

llama-perplexity

A tool for measuring the perplexity 1 (and other quality metrics) of a model over a given text.

llama-bench

Benchmark the performance of the inference for various parameters.

llama-simple

A minimal example for implementing apps with llama.cpp. Useful for developers.

Contributing

Other documentation

Development documentation

Seminal papers and background on the models

XCFramework

Completions

Bash Completion

Dependencies

Footnotes

Tags

Timeline

Verification Status

Embed Badge

`llama-cli`

A CLI tool for accessing and experimenting with most of `llama.cpp`'s functionality.

`llama-server`

`llama-perplexity`

A tool for measuring the perplexity ¹ (and other quality metrics) of a model over a given text.

`llama-bench`

`llama-simple`

A minimal example for implementing apps with `llama.cpp`. Useful for developers.