Application can't send chats to local VLLM

[jerkstorecaller]

Bug description

chat-ui can't communicate with local VLLM. Possible this is only the case if plain HTTP is used, I don't have SSL certificates.

Steps to reproduce

1. Run VLLM on your local PC. Let's say it's the default port, so it's running on http://localhost:8000/v1 for the API. My command below.
2. Use 'docker compose up' with the file given below
3. On your PC, connect to http://localhost:3000 to load. The webpage should load and the VLLM model should be detected properly.
4. Start a new chat and send something. Nothing happens.

VLLM command:

vllm serve $MODEL_PATH \
--served-model-name $MODEL_NAME \
--port 8000 \
--host 0.0.0.0 \
--max-model-len 262144 \
--max-num-seqs 4 \
--enable-prefix-caching \
--gpu-memory-utilization 0.6 \
--load-format fastsafetensors \
--enable-auto-tool-choice \
--tool-call-parser qwen3_coder \
--reasoning-parser qwen3 \
--max-num-batched-tokens 8192 \
--trust-remote-code \
--mm-encoder-tp-mode data \
-O3

chat-ui's docker-compose.yml

services:
  chat-ui:
    image: ghcr.io/huggingface/chat-ui-db:latest
    container_name: chat-ui
    init: true
    network_mode: host
    environment:
      - OPENAI_BASE_URL=http://localhost:8000/v1
      - OPENAI_API_KEY=not-needed
    volumes:
      - chat-ui-data:/data

volumes:
  chat-ui-data:

Screenshots

Context

Logs

I can see your app successfully fetching the model list and showing them in the UI settings page.

However, when I try to send a question, nothing happens. This exception is thrown in my browser:

GET http://192.168.100.100:3000/api/v2/conversations/69e7f5df4ec7018555a490d2
Error: {"message":"You don't have access to this conversation. If someone gave you this link, ask them to use the 'share' feature instead."}`

No request is sent to VLLM other than /v1/models to get the model list according to VLLM logs.

There's also this error in the browser console log when I load the app which may be related:

Cookie “hf-chat” has been rejected because a non-HTTPS cookie can’t be set as “secure”

Could this be No Cookie -> All conversations denied? Is this because I don't use SSL? That's my business, isn't it?

Specs

• OS: Ubuntu 24.04
• Browser: Firefox
• chat-ui commit: chat-ui-db b1407709b522, latest as of today

Config

Refer to docker-compose.yml

Notes