GSoC'26: OpenVINO Model Server: One-Command Installer & Developer Friendly CLI

[Beeram12]

@ravi9 @freddychiu
Hi, I am interested in working on this project. I have started exploring the existing installation process.

1. using use pre-compiled binaries for Ubuntu22, Ubuntu24, RHEL9 or Windows 11 on bare metal
2. Using Docker
3. installation in kubernetes

While I have reviewed the steps for each, my immediate next goal is to physically perform all these installations across different environments. By testing these steps, I will try to pinpoint the exact complexities and manual friction points, such as dependency conflicts or environment pathing issues, that the new one-command installer should solve.

[rishi-sangare]

Hi @ravi9 @freddychiu, I've submitted my proposal for this project.

I installed OVMS on Windows 11 following the bare-metal docs and documented the friction points I encountered: choosing from 16 release assets, DLLs not found without running setupvars, environment variables not persisting across sessions, and the health endpoint returning an empty body. Full documentation here: friction_log.md

I also built a working CLI prototype with run, health, and models commands: ovms_cli.py. Tested on Windows 11 with OVMS v2026.0 and resnet50.

One technical finding from the prototype: Windows DLL search paths don't work from Git Bash subprocesses. The CLI needs to start OVMS via PowerShell Start-Process on Windows rather than a direct subprocess call.

My existing contributions: PR #34564 (fix _is_testing), PR #34562 (fix clear_caches import, assigned to me by mlukaszewski), and Keras PR #22407 (numpy.view for OpenVINO backend, merged March 26).

Happy to discuss any aspect of the approach.