owist-modelfile-lint

Static validation for Ollama Modelfiles. Catch broken FROM paths, invalid PARAMETER values, and missing TEMPLATEs before you run ollama create and get a cryptic Go error three minutes into a model build.

Built by Openwist AI, maker of the LimitAI open model family.

The problem

ollama create parses your Modelfile on the Go side and fails late:

Error: invalid file magic

That's it. No line number, no hint about which instruction caused it, and you find out only after Ollama has already started reading your (possibly multi-gigabyte) model file. A typo'd PARAMETER key gets silently ignored instead of erroring. A missing TEMPLATE on an unrecognized base model ships a model with no chat formatting at all, and you don't notice until it responds with garbage.

owist-modelfile-lint reads your Modelfile before any of that, the same way ruff or eslint check source code before you run it.

Install

pip install owist-modelfile-lint

Usage

CLI

modelfile-lint ./Modelfile

[ERROR]   line 1: FROM path './sophia-q4.gguf' does not exist  (FROM005)
[ERROR]   line 5: PARAMETER 'temprature' is not a recognized Ollama parameter (did you mean 'temperature'?)  (PARAM002)
[WARNING] line 7: PARAMETER 'temperature' value 5.7 is outside the typical range [0.0, 2.0] (default: 0.8) — this is valid syntax but likely unintentional  (PARAM007)
[WARNING] general: no TEMPLATE instruction found and FROM points to a local file/directory — Ollama's chat-template auto-detection may fail for unrecognized architectures, producing a model with no chat formatting at all. Consider adding an explicit TEMPLATE.  (TPL002)

✗ ./Modelfile: 2 error(s), 2 warning(s)

Exit code is 0 when there are no errors (warnings don't fail the check), 1 otherwise — so it's a drop-in CI or pre-commit gate:

modelfile-lint ./Modelfile || exit 1

Other flags:

modelfile-lint ./Modelfile --quiet      # errors only, suppress warnings
modelfile-lint ./Modelfile --json       # machine-readable output
modelfile-lint ./Modelfile --no-color

Python API

from owist_modelfile_lint import lint

result = lint("Modelfile")

if not result.ok:
    for issue in result.issues:
        print(issue)
    raise SystemExit(1)

from owist_modelfile_lint import lint_text

# lint content that doesn't exist on disk yet, e.g. generated programmatically
result = lint_text("""
FROM llama3.2
PARAMETER temperature 0.7
SYSTEM You are a helpful assistant.
""")
print(result.ok)  # True

LintResult gives you .ok, .issues, .errors, .warnings, .infos, and is truthy/falsy based on .ok so if result: works too.

What it checks

This is static analysis — it never loads model weights, runs Ollama, or needs a GPU. A GGUF check reads 24 bytes of the file header, nothing more.

What it deliberately does not do

• It does not validate that your TEMPLATE Go-template syntax is semantically correct for the model's actual chat format — that requires knowing what the base model expects, which is out of scope for a static linter.
• It does not check model quality — see tinyeval (planned) for that.
• It does not talk to the Ollama daemon or registry. Library model references like FROM llama3.2 are accepted as-is without checking whether that tag exists.

Why "owist"

Short for Openwist AI — we build the LimitAI open model family (Anan, Sophia) and got tired of debugging our own Modelfiles by trial and error.

License

MIT