hedos
ἕδος (hédos), Greek for "a seat, an abode, a foundation."
hedos is a headless engine for the local models already on your machine. It finds them wherever they live, installs new ones, and serves each through the runtime that actually fits, all from one binary and a local HTTP gateway. There is no app and no browser wrapper. Everything runs on your hardware, offline.
It scans the places models really sit (the Ollama store, the Hugging Face cache, LM Studio's library, and loose GGUF or safetensors files in your folders) and puts them on a single shelf: text, image, and speech together, each tagged by where it came from. Weights are never moved, copied, or re-downloaded. The records simply point at the files where they already are, so every other tool on the machine still sees the same models.
For each model it detects the format, works out what it is and what it can do, and resolves it to a runtime: local GGUF through a llama-server process, an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, the Ollama daemon, or a managed Python sidecar (mlx-lm, mlx-vlm, speech, embeddings, diffusers, mflux, whisper). It reads each model's real context length, chat template, senses, and tool-calling dialect and serves that, so a conversation behaves the same across engines. Where a model genuinely cannot do something, the shelf says so up front instead of failing quietly.
Install
|
Cargo
Homebrew
Prebuilt binaries
Prebuilt versions are available in our GitHub releases:
| File | Platform | Checksum |
|---|---|---|
| hedos-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.xz | Apple Silicon macOS | checksum |
| hedos-x86_64-apple-darwin.tar.xz | Intel macOS | checksum |
| hedos-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz | ARM64 Linux | checksum |
| hedos-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz | x64 Linux | checksum |
Optional backends
hedos serves whatever your machine can already run, so nothing else is required to start. Add these when you want the runtimes that need them:
uvfor the Python sidecar runtimes (mlx-lm, mlx-vlm, speech, embeddings, diffusers, mflux, whisper). They provision their own environments the first time they run; the runtime code itself ships inside the binary.- A
llama-serverbinary on thePATHfor local GGUF files. - The Ollama daemon for models it manages.
Quick start
Every command takes --json when you want machine-readable output instead of formatted text.
The gateway
hedos serve binds an OpenAI- and Ollama-compatible HTTP server to loopback (127.0.0.1:43367 by default). Any editor, script, or agent on the machine can point at it and reach the models you own, tools and all:
The gateway is bound to loopback and treats every local caller as trusted. It does not require a token. Keep it on 127.0.0.1; see SECURITY.md for what that means.
Managing models
The shelf is not read-only. The install service resolves a reference (a huggingface.co or ollama.com link, an org/repo, or a name:tag) and plans the install before a byte moves: the file set, the sizes, the destination, and the pinned revision.
Installs write into each platform's native habitat. Ollama models pull through the daemon's own API. Hugging Face models download into the standard hub cache layout (blobs, snapshots, refs) with Range resume and incremental SHA-256 verified against the LFS oids. hedos owns no weights directory, so every other tool still sees the model, and installs never touch the registry; the scanners discover the result. Gated repositories authenticate with HF_TOKEN from the environment.
Removal is symmetric. hedos rm <model> shows a deletion preview (the files, the estimated bytes) and does nothing until you pass -y. File-backed models are deleted from disk; Ollama models delete through the daemon.
Runtimes
Each runtime is present whether or not its backend is installed. A capability only actually serves when its backend is available on the machine:
- local GGUF needs a
llama-serverbinary on thePATH. - Ollama needs the Ollama daemon running.
- OpenAI-compatible endpoints need a base URL and an API key in the environment.
- the Python sidecars (mlx-lm, mlx-vlm, speech, embeddings, diffusers, mflux) and whisper need
uv, which provisions their environment on first use. Their runtime code ships inside the binary. - Image daemons (ComfyUI, AUTOMATIC1111) need the daemon running.
The Apple Foundation and MLX-Swift runtimes from the original macOS build are framework-bound and are intentionally out of this headless port.
Configuration
Settings live in one human-editable file at ~/.config/hedos.toml (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/hedos.toml). State lives under ~/.local/share/hedos (or $XDG_DATA_HOME/hedos): the registry, generated artifacts, job history, the gateway's audit log, and the sidecar work directories. See docs/configuration.md.
Contributing
Deeper guides live in docs/. See CONTRIBUTING.md for how to build, test, and open a pull request; logic lives in the kernel and the CLI stays a thin shell over it. Participation is governed by our Code of Conduct, and security issues have a private channel in SECURITY.md.
hedos is MIT-licensed. See LICENSE.