Environment variables

All of these can be set in the environment; most have a CLI equivalent, and the CLI flag always wins.

Variable	Default	CLI equivalent
OLLAMA_URL	http://localhost:11434	--ollama-url
UPSTREAM_HEADERS	none	--upstream-header
MAX_TOOL_ROUNDS	unlimited	--max-tool-rounds
SYSTEM_PROMPT	none	--system-prompt
CORS_ORIGINS	*	—
OLLAMA_PROXY_TIMEOUT	unset	—

OLLAMA_URL

The Ollama server to proxy to. Useful for Docker deployments where the URL comes from the environment rather than the command line.

OLLAMA_URL=http://192.168.1.100:11434 ollama-mcp-bridge

UPSTREAM_HEADERS

A JSON object of headers to send upstream. Individual headers can be added or overridden with the repeatable --upstream-header flag.

UPSTREAM_HEADERS='{"Authorization": "Bearer token123", "X-API-Key": "secret"}' \
  ollama-mcp-bridge

Preferable to the CLI flag in Docker and systemd setups, where arguments show up in the process list.

MAX_TOOL_ROUNDS

MAX_TOOL_ROUNDS=5 ollama-mcp-bridge

SYSTEM_PROMPT

SYSTEM_PROMPT="You are a concise assistant." ollama-mcp-bridge

CORS_ORIGINS

Comma-separated list of allowed origins. See CORS.

OLLAMA_PROXY_TIMEOUT

Timeout for HTTP requests the bridge sends to Ollama, in milliseconds.

It has three distinct states, and the difference matters:

Unset (the default)

Existing behaviour is preserved — some requests use library defaults, and /api/chat is not timed out at all. This is not the same as setting it to 0.

Greater than 0

Applied to Ollama-bound HTTP requests.

Exactly 0

Timeouts are explicitly disabled. The bridge logs a warning.

# 10 minutes
OLLAMA_PROXY_TIMEOUT=600000 ollama-mcp-bridge

Streaming ignores it

Streaming chat responses always run with no timeout, whatever this is set to.