The Docker image gets about 50 MB smaller on disk (about 20 MB off the pull). uv is only needed to run the requirements install, but it is pip-installed into the image and stays there. It is now bind-mounted from the uv image for that RUN only, pinned to 0.12.10, so the runtime image never contains it. This is the pattern uv's own Docker guide recommends for the case.
Uninstalling uv at the end of the same RUN would also keep it out of the layer; the mount was preferred because it fixes the uv version and the mounted layer is cached by the builder across rebuilds.
pip stays available in the container, so hand-installing optional packages the way requirements.txt describes keeps working; only running uv inside the container goes away. The build now requires BuildKit (the syntax directive alone was a comment to the classic builder, this line makes it mandatory), needs access to ghcr.io next to PyPI, and the uv version is a pin to bump by hand, like the base images.
Part of #29721.
The main and CUDA Docker images get about 21 MB smaller (the nltk package, the punkt_tab data and its zip); slim images, which never downloaded the data, about 6 MB.
nltk was in the image for unstructured, which used it to tokenize documents. The Dockerfile download was added for airgapped containers failing on the missing punkt_tab data (#21150; the same request in #16260), the same lookup failed on first use in other setups (#17594, #4642), and the download in start.sh and start_windows.bat came with the Playwright web loader mode and sits in that branch.
unstructured 0.22.31, the pinned version, has no nltk references at all and tokenizes with spaCy, nothing else installed requires nltk outside transformers' testing and dev extras, and nothing in the backend imports it, so the pin and both downloads go together.
One user-visible consequence: a tool or function that imports nltk inside the container stops working unless it declares nltk in its frontmatter requirements. On an offline instance the package, and any nltk data such as punkt_tab, have to be installed into the image instead.
Part of #29721.
The apt layer of the Docker image shrinks by about 60 MB. python3-dev installs Debian's own interpreter with its headers, and nothing in the image uses it.
The image's Python is the /usr/local build from the base image, which ships its own headers, and it is also the interpreter that installs tool and function requirements at runtime, so Debian's headers were never on the include path of anything built in the container. The zlib headers python3-dev pulled in stay through libmariadb-dev, which also brings the OpenSSL headers, so the optional mariadb connector still builds; the only other header package that goes with it is libexpat1-dev, which nothing in the pinned tree builds against.
Part of #29721.
nltk.download picks the first entry of nltk.data.path that already exists and is
writable. None do here, so punkt_tab lands in /root/nltk_data, and /root is mode
0700. The corpus is then unreachable whenever the container does not run as
root:
nltk.data.find('tokenizers/punkt_tab')
LookupError: Resource punkt_tab not found.
/usr/local/share/nltk_data is already on nltk.data.path, so nothing changes at
the read side.
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The Python test suite was deleted in 4527c747b but its dependencies stayed behind, so pytest, pytest-docker and the docker SDK still install into every image variant, and moto joins them for anyone running pip install open-webui[all]. No Python test file remains in the repository, nothing imports these packages, and no CI job runs pytest. They are removed from backend/requirements.txt and from the all extra, which are the only two channels they ship through.
netcat-openbsd goes for the same reason. It was added in January 2024 without a consumer and nc has never been invoked anywhere in the repository, in any script, workflow or compose file. Both the readiness wait and the healthcheck use curl, and the Ollama install script does not ask for it either.
uv.lock is regenerated output, not hand-edited. It drops three of the four packages plus three transitives that nothing else needs, with no version changes and no additions. pytest stays locked because pytest-asyncio in the dev group still requires it. The dependency markers it adds on the CUDA and numpy entries are inert: each one is a superset of the condition its parent already installs under, and the resolved default install set is identical before and after.
This saves roughly 2 MB uncompressed, which is nothing next to the image as a whole. The point is that a production image stops shipping a test framework and a Docker socket client it never uses.
Everything else stays and is load-bearing. The container installs pip packages at runtime for user-authored tools and functions, so it needs git and a working compiler for anything that is not a prebuilt wheel, and libmariadb-dev for the manual MariaDB install. zstd is required for updating Ollama inside the bundled image. black looks dev-only but backs the code formatting endpoint.
Ref: https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/discussions/28716
The backend rewrites its bundled static assets under open_webui/static on
startup. Under OpenShift's restricted SCC the container runs as a random UID
(member of GID 0), which cannot write to the root-owned static dir, so boot
logs fill with '[Errno 13] Permission denied: .../static/*'.
Give GID 0 the owner's permissions on that directory (chgrp 0 + chmod g=u),
the standard Red Hat arbitrary-UID idiom. Applied unconditionally since the
app writes there on every start; complements the opt-in USE_PERMISSION_HARDENING.
Pre-download NLTK punkt_tab during Docker build instead of at runtime.
This fixes document extraction failures in offline/airgapped environments
where the container cannot download the tokenizer data after restarts.
Fixes#21150
Timothy Jaeryang Baek