ollama - 💡(How to fix) Fix Setting OLLAMA_MODELS doesn't work correctly.

What is the issue?

When setting the OLLAMA_MODELS variable to a custom path, e.g., /mnt/data/ollama/models as in the example below:

[Service] Environment="OLLAMA_MODELS=/mnt/data/ollama/models"

The service reports errors and doesn't start correctly. The very limited documentation doesn't mention any limitations or specifics of setting this variable.

In the example above, permissions are set for the ollama/models folders to ollama:ollama (user/group), but ollama doesn't have any write permissions to /mnt/data, which is correct and MUST be respected.

The expected behaviour is that the OLLAMA_MODELS path is used as provided without any question, other than whether it has read/write access to it.

Relevant log output

Error: mkdir /mnt/data/ollama: permission denied: ensure path elements are traversable

OS

Linux

GPU

Nvidia

CPU

Intel

Ollama version

0.24.0