Publish a service

Publishing turns something already listening on 127.0.0.1 into a named service on your private mesh. Nothing about the local process changes, and no public port is opened — the service becomes reachable only to machines on your network that hold a valid capability.

fabric serve http://127.0.0.1:11434/v1 --name my-model --kind llm

That is the whole operation. The rest of this page is what the parts mean and what to do when the defaults do not fit.

Include the /v1

For an OpenAI-compatible server — Ollama, vLLM, llama.cpp, LM Studio — publish the address the API is actually mounted at, which for all of them is /v1. The bare port answers, but not with the API, so callers get a 404 that looks like the model is missing rather than the address being short.

fabric serve checks this for you: publish the wrong one and it prints the address that does answer.

Before you start

The machine has to be on the network already:

fabric status

If it reports that this machine is not joined, run sudo -E fabric up first — the tunnel needs administrator rights.

Choose the kind

--kind tells the mesh what protocol lives behind the address, which is what lets a caller resolve it correctly and what determines the default action a capability grants.

kind	for	default action
llm	An OpenAI-compatible model server — Ollama, vLLM, llama.cpp, LM Studio	invoke
mcp	An MCP tool server	read
a2a	An agent-to-agent endpoint	delegate
router	A gateway in front of several models	invoke
endpoint	Any other HTTP API	invoke
tcp	A raw TCP port — a database, an SSH host	connect

If you are unsure, endpoint is the honest choice for an HTTP API and tcp for anything that is not HTTP.

Name it for the caller

The name is what teammates type, so name the capability rather than the host:

# reads well at the call site
fabric serve http://127.0.0.1:11434/v1 --name codegen-llm --kind llm

# does not
fabric serve http://127.0.0.1:11434/v1 --name ollama-2 --kind llm

Names are per-network. Publishing a second service with an existing name on the same network replaces the first.

Check it landed

fabric service list
fabric service inspect codegen-llm

fabric service test performs a real request against the local address, which distinguishes “published but the process is down” from “not published”:

fabric service test codegen-llm

Restrict who can reach it

By default any machine on the network can be granted access. --scope requires a caller’s capability to carry a matching scope, which is how you keep a service reachable by only part of the network:

fabric serve http://127.0.0.1:8080 --name payroll-api --kind endpoint --scope finance

Scopes are a filter on capabilities, not a replacement for them — a caller still needs a token. See Grant scoped access.

What the cloud learns

The control plane records the service’s name, kind and the node it is on, so it can broker reachability and enforce capabilities. It does not receive the local address, and it never sees a request, a prompt or a response — those go machine to machine over the encrypted mesh.

Remove it

fabric service remove codegen-llm

Removal is immediate: existing capability tokens for the service stop resolving.

Next

• Grant scoped access — hand someone a token for one action.
• Give a customer a demo — time-boxed access with a revoke.
• fabric serve reference — every flag.