Swama

Swama is a local AI runtime for Apple Silicon Macs, written in Swift on Apple's MLX (opens in a new tab). It runs language, vision, embedding, speech-recognition and text-to-speech models on your Mac and serves them through an OpenAI-compatible API, a command-line tool and a menu bar app.

• OpenAI-compatible API: chat completions (streaming, tool calling, image input), a stateless subset of Responses,

embeddings, audio transcription and text-to-speech (experimental).

• Decision scoring: /v1/decisions follows the OpenAI Decisions API and scores predicates, choices, and ratings without generating text.
• Model aliases: swama run qwen3.5 "…" downloads the model from Hugging Face on first use.
• Menu bar app: runs the server in the background, installs the swama command and sets the context limit.

Requirements

• Apple Silicon Mac, macOS 15.4 or later
• Building from source only: Xcode with the Swift 6.2 toolchain

Models

Any MLX model on Hugging Face can be used by its full id (for example mlx-community/Qwen3.5-9B-4bit). Common models also have short aliases:

The complete alias → model mapping is in [ModelAliases.swift](swama/Sources/SwamaKit/Model/ModelAliases.swift). FireRedASR2 is also supported by its full repository id. Known issue: in our testing on 2.4.0, gemma3 (4B) and qwen3-vl (4B) fail to load (for Gemma, possibly related to #23 (opens in a new tab)); use qwen3.5 for image input.

Command line

run and serve accept --context-limit (default 16384 tokens).

Environment variables: SWAMA_PORT (server port), SWAMA_MODELS (model directory, default ~/.swama/models), SWAMA_CONTEXT_LIMIT, SWAMA_REGISTRY (HUGGING_FACE or ), (disable prompt caching), (diagnostics log location), (turn the log off).