Use Local LLM with Cursor and Ollama

requirements

• Cursor is installed on your machine
• Ollama is installed on your machine, and you have a model
• ngrok is installed on your machine, and you have an ngrok account

Step1. Install Cursor

Go to https://www.cursor.com/ and download Cursor, then install it on your machine.

Step2. Install Ollama

Go to https://ollama.com/ and download Ollama, then install it on your machine.

Step3. Create an ngrok account and install ngrok

Go to https://ngrok.com/ and download ngrok, then install it on your machine.
Then set up ngrok.

Step4. Download(pull) a model

In this article, we'll use deepseek-r1 model
https://ollama.com/library/deepseek-r1
Open the Terminal app

# 7B-model
ollama pull deepseek-r1:latest

Step5. Enable CORS and run ngrok

# macOS & Linux
export OLLAMA_ORIGINS="*"

# If you are using Windows
set OLLAMA_ORIGINS="*"

ngrok http 11434 --host-header="localhost:11434"

Step6. Set OpenAI API Key

1. Put the model name you pulled (in this case, the model is deepseek-r1:latest) and click Add model
2. Put Ollama in API key
3. Put the URL you get from ngrok command + /v1 The URL looks like https://ngrok_something/v1
4. Click Save

Step7. Verify Ollama config

We are almost there.
Before clicking Verify button, we need to unselect all non-local models. So in this case, deepseek-r1:latest is the only selected model.
Then click Verify button.

Step8. Use a local model

This is the final step. Open Cursor and Chat (Ctrl/Cmd + l). Make sure that you select the model you added in Step 6 and send a prompt.