Running a llamafile

You have just downloaded a llamafile from the Example llamafiles section. Now what? Here are a few examples to get you started.

NOTE For the purpose of these examples, you can run any of the following either from a pre-bundled llamafile or by calling the llamafile server executable and passing it the corresponding model weights. For instance, the following two are equivalent:

llamafile -m Apertus-8B-Instruct-2509.gguf --temp ...

./Apertus-8B-Instruct-2509.llamafile --temp ...

Running llamafile in CLI mode

If you add the --cli argument to a llamafile, you will run a CLI version of the model that answers to whatever you provide as a prompt (via the -p argument) and, for multimodal models, as in image (via the --image argument).

Here's how you can use the Apertus 8B model for prose composition:

./Apertus-8B-Instruct-2509.llamafile --cli -p 'Write a story about llamas'

Here's how you can use llamafile to describe a jpg/png/gif/bmp image with a multimodal model (Qwen3.5, Ministral3, llava1.6 are all good candidates):

llamafile -ngl 9999 --temp 0 \
  --cli
  --image ~/Pictures/lemurs.jpg \
  -m llava-v1.6-mistral-7b.Q4_K_M.gguf \
  --mmproj mmproj-model-f16.gguf \
  -p 'Describe this picture'

The weights above were taken from here. Alternatively, you can use a pre-bundled llamafile:

./Ministral-3-3B-Instruct-2512-Q4_K_M.llamafile -ngl 9999 \
  --cli
  --image ~/Pictures/lemurs.jpg \
  -p 'Describe this picture'

Here's how you can use Qwen3.5 9B to summarize a Web page:

./Qwen3.5-9B-Q5_K_S.llamafile --cli -p "`(echo 'Summarize the content of the following webpage:'
  links -codepage utf-8 \
        -force-html \
        -width 500 \
        -dump https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48860/the-raven |
    sed 's/   */ /g')`"

Running llamafile in chat mode

If you add the --chat argument to a llamafile, you will run it in chat mode. Chat mode has different /commands available (type /help for the full list) which include context management, file upload, and dumping of the conversation to an output file.

Running llamafile in server mode

If you add the --server argument to a llamafile, you will run it in server mode.

Here's an example of how to run llama.cpp's built-in HTTP server. The --host parameter makes it reachable not just from your own computer, but also from other machines that can reach it via network. The --port parameter can be used to specify a different port from the default one (8080).

  ./llava-v1.6-mistral-7b-Q4_K_M.llamafile \
  --server \
  --host 0.0.0.0 \
  --port 8081

If you want to serve a model to be used by an AI agent / agentic framework, you should add the --jinja parameter and choose a context size which is large enough (but still fits your memory). For instance:

  ./gpt-oss-20b-mxfp4.llamafile \
  --server \
  --host 0.0.0.0
  --jinja
  --ctx-size 64000

Running llamafile in combined mode

Combined mode is the default for the last generation of llamafiles: when you run them without specifying any of --cli, --chat, or --server, both a server (running at http://localhost:8080) and a chat in the terminal will start simultaneously. You will then be able to e.g. run an OpenAI API endpoint while you chat in the terminal, or use different chat simultaneously.

llamafile 0.9.* examples

The following examples have not been tested with llamafile 0.10.* yet, but we thought they were too cool not to preserve them! If you are having issues testing these examples with the latest llamafiles, you can try running them with an older release... And let us know if you want them to be supported by the new build.

Here's an example of how to generate code for a libc function using the llama.cpp command line interface, utilizing WizardCoder-Python-13B weights:

llamafile \
  -m wizardcoder-python-13b-v1.0.Q8_0.gguf \
  --temp 0 -r '}\n' -r '```\n' \
  -e -p '```c\nvoid *memcpy(void *dst, const void *src, size_t size) {\n'

Here's an example of how llamafile can be used as an interactive chatbot that lets you query knowledge contained in training data:

llamafile -m llama-65b-Q5_K.gguf -p '
The following is a conversation between a Researcher and their helpful AI assistant Digital Athena which is a large language model trained on the sum of human knowledge.
Researcher: Good morning.
Digital Athena: How can I help you today?
Researcher:' --interactive --color --batch_size 1024 --ctx_size 4096 \
--keep -1 --temp 0 --mirostat 2 --in-prefix ' ' --interactive-first \
--in-suffix 'Digital Athena:' --reverse-prompt 'Researcher:'

It's possible to use BNF grammar to enforce the output is predictable and safe to use in your shell script. The simplest grammar would be --grammar 'root ::= "yes" | "no"' to force the LLM to only print to standard output either "yes\n" or "no\n". Another example is if you wanted to write a script to rename all your image files, you could say:

llamafile -ngl 9999 --temp 0 \
    --image lemurs.jpg \
    -m llava-v1.5-7b-Q4_K.gguf \
    --mmproj llava-v1.5-7b-mmproj-Q4_0.gguf \
    --grammar 'root ::= [a-z]+ (" " [a-z]+)+' \
    -e -p '### User: What do you see?\n### Assistant: ' \
    --no-display-prompt 2>/dev/null |
  sed -e's/ /_/g' -e's/$/.jpg/'
a_baby_monkey_on_the_back_of_a_mother.jpg