Installing Ollama without root
Inspired by the official guide, here is my method for installing (or updating) Ollama without root access.
Ollama Archive Format Change: .tar.zst Requires zstd
Previously, Ollama provided archives in .tar.gz format, but now only .tar.zst is available, which requires zstd.
Therefore, if we don’t have root access, we need to prepare the zstd binary in a user-local directroy beforehand and add it to $PATH.
mkdir -p ~/src
cd ~/src
curl -L https://ollama.com/download/ollama-linux-amd64.tar.zst -o ollama-linux-amd64.tar.zst
mkdir -p ~/opt/ollama
# With zstd biarny available in $PATH,
# modern tar can automatically detect and use it to decompress .tar.zst archives.
tar -C ~/opt/ollama -xf ollama-linux-amd64.tar.zst
Add Ollama to $PATH:
Then you can run ollama in your terminal:
nohup ollama serve &
ollama -v
ollama list
# Pull the embeddings model for AnythingLLM RAG
ollama pull nomic-embed-text
# Run the smallest deepseek model
ollama run deepseek-r1:5b
To stop the Ollama server: