[til] changing default ollama storage location on linux

I was downloading some large ollama models and ran out of space on my linux machine. I then realized that the default model storage location is /usr/share. This path is mounted on my OS disk and there is not much storage there so I wanted the downloaded models to be stored elsewhere. It turns out this is a common request and it can be done using an OLLAMA_MODELS environment variable. The docs cover the pieces,

• where models are stored
• configuring ollama service

but it took me a few tries.

I have a 2TB data disk mounted at /mnt/sdb. I made that direcory executable by others and then made an ollama directory and gave it

• read, write, and execute permissions for user owner
• read and execute permissions for group owner and others

with the octal value 755 (read more about linux permissions here). I then made ollama the user and group owner of that directory.

sudo chmod o+x /mnt/sdb
sudo mkdir /mnt/sdb/ollama
sudo chmod -R 755 /mnt/sdb/ollama
sudo chown -R ollama:ollama /mnt/sdb/ollama

I edited the ollama service config with,

sudo systemctl edit ollama

and added the following lines (new lines are between the commented out lines)

### Editing /etc/systemd/system/ollama.service.d/override.conf
### Anything between here and the comment below will become the contents of the drop-in file

[Service]
Environment="OLLAMA_MODELS=/mnt/sdb/ollama"

### Edits below this comment will be discarded

After that I restarted things,

sudo systemctl daemon-reload 
sudo systemctl restart ollama

Now new ollama run or ollama pull commands will use the /mnt/sdb/ollama directory for storage.

Also very helpful, you can check out the ollama service logs using,

sudo journalctl -u ollama.service