Release notes

Added

• The service reports what it can and cannot do. GET /v1/models now returns a capabilities object on the model entry. It lists supported tasks, caution flag coverage, translation languages, and whether it reads labels. Clients that ignore the key work unchanged. (c29c99b)
• Allergen and pregnancy flags from the food name. A fixed word table with exceptions like almond milk and peanut butter populates flags for recognised foods, setting flagsCoverage: "partial". Unrecognised foods omit both fields. The model, prompt, and grammar remain unchanged. (c29c99b)
• Food names in the app's language. When Accept-Language is set to de, fr, it, es or tr, the service adds a translations object per food. It uses one text-only model call with a 20-second timeout that leaves names untouched on failure. name stays English for food database searches. (c29c99b)

Changed

• The image runs on Node 24. The build stages move from node:22-bookworm-slim to node:24-bookworm-slim. The shipped image copies that Node binary. pnpm 11.5.1 comes from corepack, which reads the new packageManager field in package.json. The Dockerfile no longer names a pnpm version. engines.node is >=24. Running the container does not change. Check: scripts/check-image-boots.sh inference at the repository root. (0b10348, c59a4bf)
• A frozen-contract test guards the identification prompt and grammar. Altering the prompt or response format fails a unit test. Developers must update the hashes intentionally after re-running the baseline in eval/. (c29c99b)

Changed

• The plate contract knows the client's flags and translations. openplate now asks every provider for flags (food cautions) and translations (the food's name in each app language). The vendored contract accepts both as optional fields, and its JSON Schema lists them. This service does not fill them yet. openplate reads an answer without them as before. (cc96887)
• The Quadlet unit reads every setting from an env file you own. The unit carried each compose default as an Environment= line. Podman ranks those above an env file. On Podman 4.9, which reads no drop-in, API_KEYS and MODEL_PROFILE could only be changed by editing the installed unit. The unit now reads inference.defaults.env, which ships beside it, and then inference.env, which is yours and wins. Before you copy the new unit over an install, put your key in inference.env as API_KEYS=. The unit does not start without that file. (4158a79)
• Every setting now reaches the inference container from your .env file. The three compose files that run this service, docker/compose.yml here and openplate's compose.inference.yml and compose.full.yml, previously set five or six variables, mostly as fixed values. They now forward all 27 variables that the service and its entrypoint read. To bring your own runtime, set MODEL_PROFILE=external, MODEL_RUNTIME_URL and MODEL_ID in .env, plus the health start period override in the file. A new setting, OFF_API_URL, points FOOD_SOURCE=off at a national OpenFoodFacts host or a mirror. It defaults to https://world.openfoodfacts.org, the host that was hard-coded. With an empty .env, nothing changes. Every entry in .env.example is now commented out. It also gains the seven entrypoint settings it lacked, including LLAMA_THREADS and WEIGHTS_MIRROR_BASE. If your .env is a copy of the old .env.example, delete its PROFILE=custom line. That line now reaches the service, which then reports custom instead of following MODEL_PROFILE. tests/unit/compose-env-surface.test.ts and tests/unit/compose-defaults-inert.test.ts keep it that way. (fd225c3, c4546c6)

Fixed

• Dependencies moved past known advisories. sharp, esbuild and express are on versions without the published advisories. (3353929)
• latest and cuda now name the newest release. Both tags moved with every change to the main branch. They now move only when a release is cut. The new main and main-cuda tags follow the main branch. (f047e1e)

Docs

• The configuration guide lists the settings it missed. It adds MAX_IMAGE_BYTES, LLAMA_EXTRA_ARGS, RUNTIME_PORT, NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES, PROFILE and OFF_API_URL. It links the page of every environment variable. The hardware guide gives the latency of a simple plate and of a full breakfast, measured on a 6-core machine, instead of one figure. (4564174, 9191419)

Added

• LCC_API_KEY, an optional key for the lcc food source. Without it, lookups run on LowCarbCheck's anonymous tier. This tier allows 1,000 credits per UTC day across all requests from the host IP address, or about 41 worst-case scans. A free key from lowcarbcheck.org/developers raises that to 100,000 credits a month. The service sends the key as a bearer token to LCC_API_URL and nowhere else. It logs only whether a key is set. When unset, it sends no Authorization header.

Changed

• The guides name every outbound call. The README and the privacy guide now list food-name lookups for FOOD_SOURCE=off and FOOD_SOURCE=lcc. They also list remote EMBEDDING_RUNTIME_URL embedding calls alongside weight downloads. The configuration guide now gives the anonymous tier cost per scan.

• Correct the API and configuration guides. Both guides stated that every food entry includes a provenance field of "corpus" or "model". The field is actually optional, omitted when nothing resolves the item, and this service never emits "model". Both documents now describe what the service does.
• Add a validation check to the gate. An environment variable named in the docs must exist in the source, a list of values stated in the docs must match the schema, and a field documented as present on every item must not be optional. The check carries a written list of what it cannot verify, and lists names implemented in the openplate repository with the file and line where each was verified.

• The runtimes guide now draws the request path from the browser to your runtime. It marks the grammar-constrained decoding step, since that is the step a runtime must support.
• The README, the guides, and the three scripts whose output the guides quote were reworded to drop every em dash and en dash. No claim changed.

• The README now lists the published documentation in a Documentation table, so the project site at openplate.de can quote it.
• A release now tells the site to re-quote the docs.

The first published image.