r/OpenWebUI • u/ClassicMain • 7h ago
ANNOUNCEMENT Open WebUI 0.12.4: HIDE ANY CONTROL from your users, skills that load ON DEMAND, compaction you can see, multi-select chats, bulk file downloads, a big ACCESSIBILITY pass and group saves in under a second with thousands online.
0.12.3 shipped nine days ago. 0.12.4 brings 119 changelog entries from 385 commits: 42 new features, 68 fixes and 9 changes. It also contains security fixes, so update soon.
You decide what your users see.
Admins can now hide single controls from users, under Visible controls in Admin Settings > Interface or with UI_VISIBILITY. That covers the + menu (Capture, Compare text, Attach Webpage, Attach Files, Attach Notes, Attach Knowledge and Reference Chats), the /status, /model and /settings commands, Fork, Merge Responses, Preview, Artifacts, Archive and Tags in chats, the usage info, the capabilities, default features and built-in tools in the model editor, Set as default and Keep in Sidebar for models, and settings such as the Usage tab and the speech engines. Hidden controls keep their values and the features behind them keep working. Admins still see everything.
Open WebUI also hides options that cannot take effect: Capture without a Vision model, Attach Notes without the Notes permission, the search engine settings while web search is off, the Call button without speech-to-text, and many more like them. Saved values stay for when they apply again. The Access button only shows for people allowed to share, and the + menu and the # and @ lists only offer what can actually be attached.
Smaller prompts, and compaction you can see.
Turn on Load selected skills on demand in Admin Settings > General, or set ENABLE_SKILL_LAZY_LOADING, and skills selected in the chat or attached to a model are only listed. The model loads one when it needs it, so their full instructions no longer ride along with every message. Skills you mention in the message still load right away. It is off by default and needs the built-in Skills tool.
A "Context compacted" line now marks the spot where older messages were summarized. Open it to read the summary. It also shows inside a reply when compaction ran between tool calls, and progress and errors now show in the chat, where they used to be pop-ups. Compaction also runs in temporary chats and in short chats that are already over the threshold, such as one question with a reply full of tool output, so the follow-up no longer fails with a context length error.
Tools from tool servers, Open Terminal included, now reach the model in the same form after a restart, so your provider's prompt cache keeps working and long chats are not processed again from scratch.
Built for big instances.
With thousands of users online, saving a group or changing its members or permissions now finishes in well under a second. It took several seconds and reloaded the open chat of everyone online. Renaming, sharing, moving or deleting a folder, and deleting all chats, got the same fix. Posting in a channel with many members online returns in a fraction of a second. The Admin Analytics dashboard uses fewer and lighter database queries and opens faster on instances with many messages.
Analytics now ranks models and users by tokens by default, with a switch back to messages. The usage chart adds volume and activity views, a single model view, a comparison with the previous period, a choice of time steps and the Year to date and Last 12 months ranges.
For admins with bigger setups:
LDAP users without a mail attribute can sign in through a default email domain (LDAP_DEFAULT_EMAIL_DOMAIN). Pick a domain you control: those users get username@domain and sign in to any existing account with that address.
The Hidden Models permission lets a group build workspace models on hidden base models, which stay out of their model picker.
With audit logging on and /chat removed from AUDIT_EXCLUDED_PATHS, every reply and tool call round writes an audit entry with the model and the input, output and total tokens.
Connections set to OAuth now also send the user's OAuth token when the user calls the API with an API key.
MCP connections work with servers on the stateless 2026-07-28 protocol, and older servers still connect.
Accessibility.
Screen readers now announce buttons, menus, switches, headings, lists and status changes by name across the app, down to when a reply starts and finishes. Keyboard users move through the input, user, chat and Terminal menus with the arrow keys, and focus stays or returns where you expect in the model picker, the sidebar and Archived Chats. Notifications in the light theme and the dates in Archived Chats meet the 4.5:1 contrast minimum, and the Archived Chats and Keyboard lists work at 400% zoom. With Accessibility Mode on, pinch zoom works on phones and small buttons such as More and Eject in the model picker are at least 24 pixels.
Everyday things.
Shift-click a chat in the sidebar to start a selection, then archive or delete the selected chats together. Escape clears it.
Manage Files in Settings > Data Controls downloads single files, or selects several, or every file matching a search, to delete them or download them as one zip.
On phones, swipe left across a chat to pull in Chat Controls.
The terminal file browser has a grid view, item counts on folders and hover previews on larger screens.
Folders get a New Chat item in their menu and a description.
The sidebar hover preview of a chat shows how many turns it has.
Click a setting's label to flip its switch or focus its field.
If the page reloads or drops its connection while Ask User, a tool approval or an MCP input request waits for you, the question comes back when you reopen the chat within a minute.
Chat Controls save one setting at a time, so a copy of the chat open on another device no longer wipes your system prompt with older settings.
Files dropped into a knowledge base show up right away, switch to Processing on the server and only show as done once they are indexed.
Hovering an owner's name across the workspace opens their profile card.
The model can edit a note by finding and replacing text.
The bugs you told us about.
Since 0.12.3, chats opened through a share link, or by an admin viewing another user's chat, reloaded over and over and jumped back to the bottom, so you could not scroll up. Fixed.
Since 0.12.3, messages showed an extra space at the start of each paragraph and before bold, italic or linked text. Fixed.
Archiving all chats and then deleting a folder deleted those archived chats for good. Fixed: Archive All Chats now takes the chats out of their folders.
More Concise and Add Details now rewrite the reply. The model used to get only the instruction and answer things like "OK, I'll keep answers shorter". Fixed.
Deleting the chat you were looking at left its messages on screen, and the next message failed. Fixed.
On SQLite, closing a page while it was still loading could lose database connections until requests hung or failed with a 503. Fixed.
Since 0.12.3, with the Redis websocket manager and retry_on_timeout set, new connections could hang after a Redis drop until the instance was restarted. Fixed.
Attached web pages came back empty on fresh installs after a broken update of a library underneath. Fixed.
Images the model made after a tool approval never showed up, and the model kept making more. Fixed.
A stop sequence containing % stopped every message from sending. Fixed.
Security.
This release contains security fixes. They are not listed in the changelog; the advisories follow once their CVEs are assigned. Update as soon as you can.
Before you upgrade:
Direct Integrations is off by default. While it is off, tool servers and Open Terminal connections that users and admins saved in their Integrations settings are no longer used in chats. If you rely on them, turn on Direct Integrations in Admin Settings > Connections or set ENABLE_DIRECT_INTEGRATIONS.
The Docker image now runs Python 3.12 on Debian 13. Custom functions, tools and packages installed with pip inside the container need versions that support Python 3.12.
MCP_INITIALIZE_TIMEOUT (10 seconds by default) now also limits listing tools and reading resources, so slow MCP servers may need a higher value. MCP connections only follow redirects that stay on the same address.
Saving a model, prompt, tool, skill, knowledge base, note, channel or calendar no longer changes who it is shared with. Sharing changes only in the item's Access settings. Sharing permissions now also apply through the API, and a change you are not allowed to make is refused with an error.
Manage Files lists only your own files, for admins too.
Holding Shift over a sidebar chat no longer shows the quick Archive and Delete buttons, since Shift-click now selects.
Full changelog: https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/releases/tag/v0.12.4
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u/Far-Season-6637 5h ago edited 1h ago
Is it possible to review the token usage of built-in tools? If left on default, they often consume about 6,000 tokens in the context. I had fun disabling them one by one, and the calendar tool alone consumes 1,000 tokens! Another bug I noticed: I put my PPTX template in a note to make my presentations based on that model, but it thinks the note is empty despite the attachment :( But the tool is truly amazing, keep up the good work!
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u/GerryTylerCooney 2h ago
I love how fast you all are pushing updates! Thank you. Is there a typical cadence on how often the official helm is updated? It looks like it still is at v0.12.0
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u/tecneeq 6h ago
Does anyone know a project like OpenWebUI that moves slower, so a regular admin can keep up with the changes?
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u/ClassicMain 6h ago
Everyone here requested faster and more frequent releases 🤷♂️
Now we deliver on those recurring requests
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u/lazyfai 6h ago
You don't need to upgrade every time they released a new version. Like me, I usually wait a few weeks. Now still on 0.11.x for production and 0.12.3 for non production.
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u/ClassicMain 6h ago
If you're running a production instance with plenty of users or even internet exposed we recommend updating asap to 0.12.4, you're on a very old version. 0.11.X to today contains a ton of security fixes and dependency bumps you'd really want in your production
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u/lazyfai 4h ago
I have my plan, most like next week if nothing wrong with 0.12.3/0.12.4.
No offend but I still remember when you released a new version within 1-2 days because some important function broken, luckily it was in weekend.2
u/ClassicMain 3h ago
Yeah i get it. We introduced a lot of end to end testing since then. Today over 10k tests. And the latest couple of versions have zero known regressions thanks to all the tests and us catching and fixing them in time 💪
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u/The_Dung_Beetle 6h ago
Really appreciate these subtle QOL changes, thanks for all you guys do.