I have read a lot of questions about OLLAMA once being able to be used for local (cheap and faster) LLM’s in cursor. But it appears they have disabled the function to do so.
Does anyone have any idea how we can fix this?
Hey, thanks for the question.
Right now, Cursor doesn’t support direct connections to local models like Ollama running on localhost. The “Override OpenAI Base URL” option needs a publicly accessible HTTPS endpoint because all requests go through Cursor’s servers to build prompts.
There’s a workaround. You can use tunneling, like ngrok or Cloudflare Tunnel, to expose your local Ollama instance as a public HTTPS endpoint. Then use that URL in Cursor: Settings > Models > Override OpenAI Base URL.
Related discussion: Setup Ollama (local model) in Cursor
The team is aware of requests for native support for local models without tunneling.
Because of the cost of API access, many users need to argument with local LLMs. Please expand these capabilities, cursor might have a future also support local LLM models if API costs are too high.
You could provide two options: one that routes through Cursor’s servers, and another that bypasses them entirely. As an added bonus, this would also save on your bandwidth costs.
Hey, thanks for the feedback. A full bypass of Cursor servers is currently an architectural limitation, not a bandwidth-saving choice. Prompt building, context retrieval, and Cursor Tab and Agent run on our side, so even with a custom endpoint the request still goes through our backend.
Native local model support without tunneling is something we’re aware users want. We don’t have a concrete timeline for it yet.
For now, the working approach is the same: expose your local Ollama via ngrok or Cloudflare Tunnel and set the public HTTPS URL in Settings > Models > Override OpenAI Base URL.