#
Onboarding: Your First Steps ⛵

Now that you have all the details, let’s get started! We’re going to do four things:

1. Create your Hugging Face Account if it’s not already done
2. Sign up to Discord and introduce yourself (don’t be shy 🤗)
3. Follow the Hugging Face Agents Course on the Hub
4. Spread the word about the course

###
Step 1: Create Your Hugging Face Account

(If you haven’t already) create a Hugging Face account here.

###
Step 2: Join Our Discord Community

👉🏻 Join our discord server here.

When you join, remember to introduce yourself in `#introduce-yourself`.

We have multiple AI Agent-related channels:

- `agents-course-announcements`: for the latest course information.
- `🎓-agents-course-general`: for general discussions and chitchat.
- `agents-course-questions`: to ask questions and help your classmates.
- `agents-course-showcase`: to show your best agents.

In addition you can check:

- `smolagents`: for discussion and support with the library.

If this is your first time using Discord, we wrote a Discord 101 to get the best practices. Check the next section.

###
Step 3: Follow the Hugging Face Agent Course Organization

Stay up to date with the latest course materials, updates, and announcements by following the Hugging Face Agents Course Organization.

👉 Go here and click on follow.

###
Step 4: Spread the word about the course

Help us make this course more visible! There are two ways you can help us:

1. Show your support by ⭐ the course’s repository.

2. Share Your Learning Journey: Let others know you’re taking this course! We’ve prepared an illustration you can use in your social media posts

You can download the image by clicking 👉 here

###
Step 5: Running Models Locally with Ollama (In case you run into Credit limits)

1. Install Ollama

   Follow the official Instructions here.

2. Pull a model Locally

       ollama pull qwen2:7b

   Here, we pull the qwen2:7b model. Check out the ollama website for more models.

3. Start Ollama in the background (In one terminal)

       ollama serve

   If you run into the error “listen tcp 127.0.0.1:11434: bind: address already in use”, you can use command `sudo lsof -i :11434` to identify the process ID (PID) that is currently using this port. If the process is `ollama`, it is likely that the installation script above has started ollama service, so you can skip this command to start Ollama.

4. Use `LiteLLMModel` Instead of `InferenceClientModel`

   To use `LiteLLMModel` module in `smolagents`, you may run `pip` command to install the module.

        pip install 'smolagents[litellm]'

        from smolagents import LiteLLMModel

        model = LiteLLMModel(
            model_id="ollama_chat/qwen2:7b",  # Or try other Ollama-supported models
            api_base="http://127.0.0.1:11434",  # Default Ollama local server
            num_ctx=8192,
        )

5. Why this works?

- Ollama serves models locally using an OpenAI-compatible API at `http://localhost:11434`.
- `LiteLLMModel` is built to communicate with any model that supports the OpenAI chat/completion API format.
- This means you can simply swap out `InferenceClientModel` for `LiteLLMModel` no other code changes required. It’s a seamless, plug-and-play solution.

Congratulations! 🎉 You’ve completed the onboarding process! You’re now ready to start learning about AI Agents. Have fun!

Keep Learning, stay awesome 🤗

Update on GitHub