Self-hosted bookmarks that tag themselves with local AI (Karakeep)

What they built

A homelab playbook that installs Karakeep, a self-hosted 'bookmark everything' manager, on Debian/Ubuntu with its official script. It wires automatic tagging to a local Ollama model so no bookmark or tag touches a cloud API.

Setup

• Debian 12 / Ubuntu 24.04 (author uses a Proxmox LXC), 2 CPU / 4 GB RAM / 30 GB disk floor
• Karakeep + Meilisearch via the official install script
• Ollama server with gemma3:4b (multimodal for text and image tagging)

Results & numbers

• CPU-only hardware: roughly 1-3 minutes per bookmark

Gotchas

• INFERENCE_TEXT_MODEL must be set, or Karakeep tries OpenAI and fails
• Small models choke on strict JSON-schema output; set INFERENCE_OUTPUT_SCHEMA=plain
• Raise the 30-second job timeout
• Never use localhost for OLLAMA_BASE_URL; inside the container it points to itself

“The plain-output setting is the make-or-break.”— peira.dev

Do it yourself

1. Run the official karakeep-linux.sh as root
2. Pull gemma3:4b on your Ollama server
3. Append the env block below to /etc/karakeep/karakeep.env
4. systemctl restart karakeep-workers karakeep-web
5. Save a bookmark and watch the worker log for local calls

OLLAMA_BASE_URL=http://10.0.0.40:11434
INFERENCE_TEXT_MODEL=gemma3:4b
INFERENCE_IMAGE_MODEL=gemma3:4b
INFERENCE_CONTEXT_LENGTH=4096
INFERENCE_JOB_TIMEOUT_SEC=600
INFERENCE_OUTPUT_SCHEMA=plain