ollama serve required after changing OLLAMA_MODELS directory

Hi everyone, This is probably a simple problem, but I can't get my head around it. I am running ollama 0.33.3 on Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.3 with separate partitions for root and home. The standard install process works correctly, however I would like to experiment with multiple models. Unfortunately I have enough space left on the root partition for a single model, so I changed the model directory by adding the line Environment="OLLAMA_MODELS=/home/directory_I_want_to_use" to /etc/systemd/system/ollama.service and changing the owner of the new directory to ollama. This worked, however it is now necessary to execute ollama serve on a separate terminal window in order to use ollama. I ran sudo systemctl daemon-reload and sudo systemctl restart ollama without success. If I comment out the added Environment line in ollama.service, ollama runs correctly via systemctl without requiring ollama serve, however I see no installed models (which makes sense, since I removed all models from /usr/share/ollama/.ollama/models). Is there a way to keep the new model directory and run ollama as a service with systemctl? submitted by /u/An_bee [link] [comments]

Source: r/ollama | 2026-09-08