For now I'm symlinking ~/.ollama to another spot in macOS, but agree it would make sense to utilize ~/Library, %AppData% and the like while letting folks choose if they'd like to store things (particularly model blobs/manifests) in a user-defined spot.

A few related tickets, albeit these are more focused on just the model blobs:

• Where are the models pulled to?  #155
• Control model cache location (set ollama directory to something other than ~/.ollama)  #153

If I understand correctly, #897 does not implement this feature request, since it only changes the path of the model files, but the path ~/.ollama remains in use for other purposes (see https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Ajmorganca%2Follama%20%22.ollama%22&type=code), notably for the server authentication, logs and readline history.

(There’s another, minor, issue that this solution still requires explicitly setting an environment variable instead of using the appropriate location by default: ideally ~/.ollama should only ever be used as a fallback [if it exists and the correct location doesn’t] for backwards compatibility.)

I'd like to add that there is a quasi-standard called XDG, which helps to keep $HOME clean and to organize applications files.

E.g. the model files could live under $XDG_DATA_HOME/ollama/models - which would mostly be $HOME/.local/share/ollama/models.

This would reduce surprises, at least for those familiar with XDG.

I mean a user being able to set OLLAMA_HOME would be sufficient.
And align perfectly with OLLAMA_MODELS of #897.

I personally like the location in the user dir; a lot of other linuxy tools do that as well.
And for the models, I share them with multiple users of the computers (they are huge) so I symlinked the models folder to a shared location anyway.

Maybe:

os.UserConfigDir

os.UserCacheDir

Made #4382 to address this, but don't know much about macOS to debug the failing test. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

This is the second most voted issue.

Will a config file placed in ~/.config/ollama/ dir solve the problem?

#4821 moves model path configuration into unified location. The next step would be to add config file to read values for these variables.

Any updates on this?

Don't know if this deserves its own separate issue, but when utilizing the OLLAMA_HOME env variable, all data is moved and accessed as expected, but keys are ignored if in the OLLAMA_HOME assigned-directory, and ollama produces a directory containing duplicates to read from.