foreman

🪓 A small, always-on Go daemon that fronts one Ollama target. It turns a single Ollama instance into a queued, observable job endpoint: it polls the target's installed models, serializes work through the target (managing model swaps), assigns every job an ID, and reports progress via webhooks.

On the wire it speaks native Ollama, so it doubles as a drop-in target for any Ollama client — including majordomo (via its ollama.Foreman(url, token) preset) and, through that, gadfly. Point a client at the foreman URL instead of the raw Ollama and you get queuing + model-swap serialization for free.

This is a public, vibe-coded project (built largely by an AI agent). It runs the author's homelab but is intentionally generic — one daemon, one target, one queue. Treat the homelab specifics in the docs as illustrative, and don't oversell it: it's a deliberately small queue in front of Ollama, not a distributed scheduler.

Quickstart

# Set the required Ollama target URL
export FOREMAN_OLLAMA_URL=http://mac.tail:11434

# Run directly
go run ./cmd/foreman serve

# Or build and run
go build -o foreman ./cmd/foreman
./foreman serve

Docker

docker build -t foreman .
docker run -e FOREMAN_OLLAMA_URL=http://mac.tail:11434 -p 8080:8080 foreman

Configuration

All configuration is via environment variables, namespaced under FOREMAN_*. See .env.example for the full list.

Variable	Default	Description
FOREMAN_ADDR	:8080	Listen address
FOREMAN_OLLAMA_URL	(required)	Ollama target base URL
FOREMAN_OLLAMA_TOKEN	(empty)	Bearer token sent to the target
FOREMAN_TOKEN	(empty)	Bearer token callers must present
FOREMAN_EMBED_MODEL	(empty)	Always-resident embedder model
FOREMAN_DB_PATH	foreman.db	SQLite database path
FOREMAN_POLL_INTERVAL	30s	Target model poll interval
FOREMAN_WEBHOOK_SECRET	(empty)	HMAC key for webhook signing

Health check

curl http://localhost:8080/healthz
# {"status":"ok","degraded":false}

Architecture

See docs/adr/ for design decisions. Key points:

• One daemon per Ollama target (ADR-0001)
• SQLite-backed durable job queue in WAL mode (ADR-0008)
• Single worker loop with drain-by-model scheduling (ADR-0009)
• Native Ollama passthrough + async /jobs surface (ADR-0003, ADR-0004)
• Embeddings bypass the queue entirely (ADR-0013)

License

MIT © 2026 Steve Dudenhoeffer.