Run Claude Code Locally for Free with Docker Model Runner

We know that the Claude Code is phenomenal for development and code. But we can easily run out of tokens, and it becomes quickly expensive as your project becomes more complex. What if we can keep all the good parts about the Claude Code, but use the local models instead of clouds once from Anthropic?

Another reason we want to use the local models is that we have something proprietary or private that we don't want to expose to the cloud models, or we are in flight with no internet connection.

This is where Docker Model Runner is really useful; it helps us run the LLMs very easily locally on our machine, and we will then we will do some configuration to make it work with the Claude Code.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, make sure you have:

Docker Desktop or Docker Engine installed.
Docker Model Runner enabled.
Claude Code is installed and ready to go.

If you're on Docker Desktop, head over to Settings > AI and enable TCP access for Model Runner.

Or, if you prefer the terminal:

docker desktop enable model-runner --tcp 12434

Getting Started

1. Choosing and pulling a local model

There are a load of LLMs to choose from. I'll go with ai/phi4:14B-Q4_K_M, but you can pick whatever fits your machine can handle.

You can find all the models here in the DocketHub AI catalogue. Make sure that whenever you choose a model that is good on the coding side.

To pull the model, execute the command below. Pull time depends on the size of the model.

docker model pull ai/phi4:14B-Q4_K_M

2. Checking the connection

Using docker model sub-commands, we can check various things like the status and the model we have pulled. It's very similar to how we work with Docker images and containers.

Run the command below to check the model status and the list of models we have

docker model status
docker model ls

3. Testing the endpoint

Before we jump to test and use Claude Code, we should confirm that the API is actually responding. We can curl and send the request to the /v1/messages endpoint, and check that.

This is how the curl structure will look. Let's execute it in the terminal.

curl http://localhost:12434/v1/messages \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "ai/phi4:14B-Q4_K_M",
    "max_tokens": 100,
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}]
  }'

We will get a response like this. I am using jq to better format the output.

4: Pointing Claude Code at the local endpoint

It is very simple. We just need to tell Claude Code to use the local API instead of Anthropic's. We can do it by setting up a variable and a model name.

Set the ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL environment variable to use the Docker Model Runner endpoint and pass the model name we pull with --model. Execute the command below to set that:

ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://localhost:12434 claude --model ai/devstral-small-2

That's about it. Claude Code is now pointing and running against your local model. You can also see the model being used by the Claude Code.

5: Adding the Shell config

As we know, the environment variable ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL is not persistent, and only lives for that session of the terminal. Setting the env variable every time is annoying.

To make it permanent so that every time you openup and new terminal, you have the same setup, we need to add the below shell config (~/.zshrc, ~/.bashrc, etc):

export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://localhost:12434

After you've done this. Restart your terminal, now the Claude Code will always use your local endpoint when you pass --model.

6. Using the Claude Code

Now, everything is set. Let's run Claude's code. To run with the local model, pass the same model flag and name, like this:

claude --model ai/phi4:14B-Q4_K_M

And we can give some simple tasks to check it's working:

6. Watching the requests flow

If you are a bit nerdy like me, and want to see what is happening under the hood. You can actually watch every request Claude Code is making to your local model:

To do that, execute the command below:

docker model requests --model ai/phi4:14B-Q4_K_M

Again, we used jq for better formatting.

7: What next?

The default context size on most models is fine for small tasks, but Claude Code reads a lot of files. For big project work, you'll want more headroom and a bigger context.

For example, to package gpt-oss with a 32k context window:

docker model pull ai/gpt-oss
docker model package --from ai/gpt-oss --context-size 32000 gpt-oss:32k

Then run Claude Code with the new variant:

claude --model gpt-oss:32k

And this is the game: we keep trying and experimenting with different models and context sizes until we find a perfect model for a task.

That was it. That's how you can run Claude Code completely locally with Docker Model Runner.

Give it a try, and let me know what model works best for you.

As always, I'm glad you made it to the end. Thank you for your support and reading. I regularly share tips on Twitter. You can connect with me there.

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