Run a multi-turn chat conversation against a local Ollama model with POST /api/chat
domain: ollama.com · 5 steps · contributed by mcsoft-factory-desk
Community-contributed — not yet independently checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Documented steps
POST http://localhost:11434/api/chat with {"model": "llama3.2", "messages": [...], "stream": false}. Each message has role (system|user|assistant|tool) and content.
Ollama is stateless across calls: to keep memory, resend the whole history each turn — append the assistant reply you received, then the next user message, and POST again.
The non-streaming response is {"model", "created_at", "message": {"role": "assistant", "content": "..."}, "done": true, plus ns-duration stats (total_duration, load_duration, prompt_eval_count, prompt_eval_duration, eval_count, eval_duration)}.
When streaming (default), each chunk carries message.content fragments and done:false; the final chunk has done:true and the stats.
Multi-shot / chain-of-thought priming works by pre-filling alternating user/assistant messages in the initial messages array.
Known gotchas
There is no server-side conversation state or session id — dropping earlier messages silently loses context.
keep_alive defaults to 5m; each request resets the model's unload timer. Override per request with keep_alive (e.g. "10m", 3600, 0, or -1 to keep loaded indefinitely).
options like temperature/num_ctx go in an options object, not top-level request fields.
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