#
GGUF usage with llama.cpp

> You can now deploy any llama.cpp compatible GGUF on Hugging Face Endpoints, read more about it here

Llama.cpp allows you to download and run inference on a GGUF simply by providing a path to the Hugging Face repo path and the file name. llama.cpp downloads the model checkpoint and automatically caches it. The location of the cache is defined by `LLAMA_CACHE` environment variable; read more about it here.

You can install llama.cpp through brew (works on Mac and Linux), or you can build it from source. There are also pre-built binaries and Docker images that you can check in the official documentation.

###
Option 1: Install with brew/ winget

    brew install llama.cpp

or, on windows via winget

    winget install llama.cpp

###
Option 2: build from source

Step 1: Clone llama.cpp from GitHub.

    git clone https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp

Step 2: Move into the llama.cpp folder and build it. You can also add hardware-specific flags (for ex: `-DGGML_CUDA=1` for Nvidia GPUs).

    cd llama.cpp
    cmake -B build   # optionally, add -DGGML_CUDA=ON to activate CUDA
    cmake --build build --config Release

Note: for other hardware support (for ex: AMD ROCm, Intel SYCL), please refer to llama.cpp’s build guide

Once installed, you can use the `llama-cli` or `llama-server` as follows:

    llama-cli -hf bartowski/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct-GGUF:Q8_0

Note: You can explicitly add `-no-cnv` to run the CLI in raw completion mode (non-chat mode).

Additionally, you can invoke an OpenAI spec chat completions endpoint directly using the llama.cpp server:

    llama-server -hf bartowski/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct-GGUF:Q8_0

After running the server you can simply utilise the endpoint as below:

    curl http://localhost:8080/v1/chat/completions \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer no-key" \
    -d '{
    "messages": [
        {
            "role": "system",
            "content": "You are an AI assistant. Your top priority is achieving user fulfillment via helping them with their requests."
        },
        {
            "role": "user",
            "content": "Write a limerick about Python exceptions"
        }
      ]
    }'

Replace `-hf` with any valid Hugging Face hub repo name - off you go! 🦙

Update on GitHub