Run a Model in Ollama
From the Ollama cheat sheet · Running Models · verified Jul 2026
Run a Model
Start an interactive chat session with a model.
bash
# Run a model (downloads if not present)
ollama run llama3.2
# Run a specific size variant
ollama run llama3.2:1b
ollama run gemma3:27b
# Run with a one-off prompt (no interactive session)
ollama run llama3.2 "Explain Docker in one sentence"💡 Models are automatically downloaded on first run if not already pulled
⚡ Use the tag (e.g., :1b, :8b, :27b) to pick a specific model size
📌 Interactive mode supports multi-line input with triple quotes (""")
🟢 Vision models like gemma3 can accept image file paths directly
runchatcli