OpenAI Functions and Tools

LocalAI supports running the OpenAI functions and tools API across multiple backends. The OpenAI request shape is the same regardless of which backend runs your model — LocalAI is responsible for extracting structured tool calls from the model’s output before returning the response.

localai-functions-1 localai-functions-1

To learn more about OpenAI functions, see also the OpenAI API blog post.

LocalAI also supports JSON mode out of the box on llama.cpp-compatible models.

💡 Check out LocalAGI for an example on how to use LocalAI functions.

Supported backends

BackendHow tool calls are extracted
llama.cppC++ incremental parser; any ggml/gguf model works out of the box, no configuration needed
vllmvLLM’s native ToolParserManager — select a parser with tool_parser:<name> in the model options. Auto-set by the gallery importer for known families
vllm-omniSame as vLLM
mlxmlx_lm.tool_parsers — auto-detected from the chat template, no configuration needed
mlx-vlmmlx_vlm.tool_parsers (with fallback to mlx-lm parsers) — auto-detected from the chat template, no configuration needed

Reasoning content (<think>...</think> blocks from DeepSeek R1, Qwen3, Gemma 4, etc.) is returned in the OpenAI reasoning_content field on the same backends.

Setup

llama.cpp

No configuration required — the autoparser detects the tool call format for any ggml/gguf model that was trained with tool support.

vLLM / vLLM Omni

The parser must be specified explicitly because vLLM itself doesn’t auto-detect one. Pass it via the model options:

name: qwen3-8b
backend: vllm
parameters:
  model: Qwen/Qwen3-8B
options:
  - tool_parser:hermes
  - reasoning_parser:qwen3
template:
  use_tokenizer_template: true

When you import a vLLM model through the LocalAI gallery, the importer looks up the model family and pre-fills tool_parser: and reasoning_parser: for you — you only need to override them for non-standard model names.

Available tool parsers include hermes, llama3_json, llama4_pythonic, mistral, qwen3_xml, deepseek_v3, granite4, kimi_k2, glm45, and more. Available reasoning parsers include deepseek_r1, qwen3, mistral, gemma4, granite. See the upstream vLLM documentation for the full list.

MLX / MLX-VLM

MLX backends auto-detect the right tool parser by inspecting the model’s chat template — you don’t need to set anything. Just load an MLX-quantized model that was trained with tool support:

name: qwen2.5-0.5b-mlx
backend: mlx
parameters:
  model: mlx-community/Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct-4bit
template:
  use_tokenizer_template: true

The gallery importer will still append tool_parser: and reasoning_parser: entries to the YAML for visibility and consistency with the other backends, but those are informational — the runtime auto-detection in the MLX backend ignores them and uses the parser matched to the chat template.

Supported parser families: hermes/json_tools, mistral, gemma4, glm47, kimi_k2, longcat, minimax_m2, pythonic, qwen3_coder, function_gemma.

Usage example

You can configure a model manually with a YAML config file in the models directory, for example:

name: gpt-3.5-turbo
parameters:
  # Model file name
  model: ggml-openllama.bin
  top_p: 80
  top_k: 0.9
  temperature: 0.1

To use the functions with the OpenAI client in python:

from openai import OpenAI

messages = [{"role": "user", "content": "What is the weather like in Beijing now?"}]
tools = [
    {
        "type": "function",
        "function": {
            "name": "get_current_weather",
            "description": "Return the temperature of the specified region specified by the user",
            "parameters": {
                "type": "object",
                "properties": {
                    "location": {
                        "type": "string",
                        "description": "User specified region",
                    },
                    "unit": {
                        "type": "string",
                        "enum": ["celsius", "fahrenheit"],
                        "description": "temperature unit"
                    },
                },
                "required": ["location"],
            },
        },
    }
]

client = OpenAI(
    # This is the default and can be omitted
    api_key="test",
    base_url="http://localhost:8080/v1/"
)

response =client.chat.completions.create(
    messages=messages,
    tools=tools,
    tool_choice ="auto",
    model="gpt-4",
)
#...

For example, with curl:

curl http://localhost:8080/v1/chat/completions -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{
  "model": "gpt-4",
  "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "What is the weather like in Beijing now?"}],
  "tools": [
        {
            "type": "function",
            "function": {
                "name": "get_current_weather",
                "description": "Return the temperature of the specified region specified by the user",
                "parameters": {
                    "type": "object",
                    "properties": {
                        "location": {
                            "type": "string",
                            "description": "User specified region"
                        },
                        "unit": {
                            "type": "string",
                            "enum": ["celsius", "fahrenheit"],
                            "description": "temperature unit"
                        }
                    },
                    "required": ["location"]
                }
            }
        }
    ],
    "tool_choice":"auto"
}'

Return data：

{
    "created": 1724210813,
    "object": "chat.completion",
    "id": "16b57014-477c-4e6b-8d25-aad028a5625e",
    "model": "gpt-4",
    "choices": [
        {
            "index": 0,
            "finish_reason": "tool_calls",
            "message": {
                "role": "assistant",
                "content": "",
                "tool_calls": [
                    {
                        "index": 0,
                        "id": "16b57014-477c-4e6b-8d25-aad028a5625e",
                        "type": "function",
                        "function": {
                            "name": "get_current_weather",
                            "arguments": "{\"location\":\"Beijing\",\"unit\":\"celsius\"}"
                        }
                    }
                ]
            }
        }
    ],
    "usage": {
        "prompt_tokens": 221,
        "completion_tokens": 26,
        "total_tokens": 247
    }
}

Advanced

Use functions without grammars

The functions calls maps automatically to grammars which are currently supported only by llama.cpp, however, it is possible to turn off the use of grammars, and extract tool arguments from the LLM responses, by specifying in the YAML file no_grammar and a regex to map the response from the LLM:

name: model_name
parameters:
  # Model file name
  model: model/name

function:
  # set to true to not use grammars
  no_grammar: true
  # set one or more regexes used to extract the function tool arguments from the LLM response
  response_regex:
  - "(?P<function>\w+)\s*\((?P<arguments>.*)\)"

The response regex have to be a regex with named parameters to allow to scan the function name and the arguments. For instance, consider:

(?P<function>\w+)\s*\((?P<arguments>.*)\)

will catch

function_name({ "foo": "bar"})

Parallel tools calls

This feature is experimental and has to be configured in the YAML of the model by enabling function.parallel_calls:

name: gpt-3.5-turbo
parameters:
  # Model file name
  model: ggml-openllama.bin
  top_p: 80
  top_k: 0.9
  temperature: 0.1

function:
  # set to true to allow the model to call multiple functions in parallel
  parallel_calls: true

Use functions with grammar

It is possible to also specify the full function signature (for debugging, or to use with other clients).

The chat endpoint accepts the grammar_json_functions additional parameter which takes a JSON schema object.

For example, with curl:

curl http://localhost:8080/v1/chat/completions -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{
     "model": "gpt-4",
     "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "How are you?"}],
     "temperature": 0.1,
     "grammar_json_functions": {
        "oneOf": [
            {
                "type": "object",
                "properties": {
                    "function": {"const": "create_event"},
                    "arguments": {
                        "type": "object",
                        "properties": {
                            "title": {"type": "string"},
                            "date": {"type": "string"},
                            "time": {"type": "string"}
                        }
                    }
                }
            },
            {
                "type": "object",
                "properties": {
                    "function": {"const": "search"},
                    "arguments": {
                        "type": "object",
                        "properties": {
                            "query": {"type": "string"}
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        ]
    }
   }'

Grammars and function tools can be used as well in conjunction with vision APIs:

 curl http://localhost:8080/v1/chat/completions -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{
     "model": "llava", "grammar": "root ::= (\"yes\" | \"no\")",
     "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": [{"type":"text", "text": "Is there some grass in the image?"}, {"type": "image_url", "image_url": {"url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dd/Gfp-wisconsin-madison-the-nature-boardwalk.jpg/2560px-Gfp-wisconsin-madison-the-nature-boardwalk.jpg" }}], "temperature": 0.9}]}'

💡 Examples

A full e2e example with docker-compose is available here.