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OpenWeb UI with LiteLLM

This guide walks you through connecting OpenWeb UI to LiteLLM. Using LiteLLM with OpenWeb UI allows teams to

  • Access 100+ LLMs on OpenWeb UI
  • Track Spend / Usage, Set Budget Limits
  • Send Request/Response Logs to logging destinations like langfuse, s3, gcs buckets, etc.
  • Set access controls eg. Control what models OpenWebUI can access.

Quickstart​

1. Start LiteLLM & OpenWebUI​

Deploy this docker compose to deploy both OpenWebUI and LiteLLM.

docker compose up -d

2. Create a Virtual Key on LiteLLM​

Virtual Keys are API Keys that allow you to authenticate to LiteLLM Proxy. We will create a Virtual Key that will allow OpenWebUI to access LiteLLM.

2.1 LiteLLM User Management Hierarchy​

On LiteLLM, you can create Organizations, Teams, Users and Virtual Keys. For this tutorial, we will create a Team and a Virtual Key.

  • Organization - An Organization is a group of Teams. (US Engineering, EU Developer Tools)
  • Team - A Team is a group of Users. (OpenWeb UI Team, Data Science Team, etc.)
  • User - A User is an individual user (employee, developer, eg. krrish@litellm.ai)
  • Virtual Key - A Virtual Key is an API Key that allows you to authenticate to LiteLLM Proxy. A Virtual Key is associated with a User or Team.

Once the Team is created, you can invite Users to the Team. You can read more about LiteLLM's User Management here.

2.2 Create a Team on LiteLLM​

Navigate to http://localhost:4000/ui and create a new team.

2.2 Create a Virtual Key on LiteLLM​

Navigate to http://localhost:4000/ui and create a new virtual Key.

LiteLLM allows you to specify what models are available on OpenWeb UI (by specifying the models the key will have access to).

3. Connect OpenWeb UI to LiteLLM​

On OpenWeb UI, navigate to Settings -> Connections and create a new connection to LiteLLM

Enter the following details:

  • URL: http://localhost:4000 (your litellm proxy base url)
  • Key: your-virtual-key (the key you created in the previous step)

3.1 Test Request​

On the top left corner, select models you should only see the models you gave the key access to in Step 2.

Once you selected a model, enter your message content and click on Submit

3.2 Tracking Spend / Usage​

After your request is made, navigate to Logs on the LiteLLM UI, you can see Team, Key, Model, Usage and Cost.

Render thinking content on OpenWeb UI​

OpenWebUI requires reasoning/thinking content to be rendered with <think></think> tags. In order to render this for specific models, you can use the merge_reasoning_content_in_choices litellm parameter.

Example litellm config.yaml:

model_list:
  - model_name: thinking-anthropic-claude-3-7-sonnet
    litellm_params:
      model: bedrock/us.anthropic.claude-3-7-sonnet-20250219-v1:0
      thinking: {"type": "enabled", "budget_tokens": 1024}
      max_tokens: 1080
      merge_reasoning_content_in_choices: true

Test it on OpenWeb UI​

On the models dropdown select thinking-anthropic-claude-3-7-sonnet