Upload files to the Hub

Sharing your files and work is an important aspect of the Hub. The huggingface_hub offers several options for uploading your files to the Hub. You can use these functions independently or integrate them into your library, making it more convenient for your users to interact with the Hub. This guide will show you how to push files:

• without using Git.
• that are very large with Git LFS.
• with the commit context manager.
• with the push_to_hub() function.

Whenever you want to upload files to the Hub, you need to log in to your Model Database account:

• Log in to your Model Database account with the following command:

  Copied

  huggingface-cli login
  # or using an environment variable
  huggingface-cli login --token $HUGGINGFACE_TOKEN

• Alternatively, you can programmatically login using login() in a notebook or a script:

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  >>> from huggingface_hub import login
  >>> login()

  If ran in a Jupyter or Colaboratory notebook, login() will launch a widget from which you can enter your Model Database access token. Otherwise, a message will be prompted in the terminal.

  It is also possible to login programmatically without the widget by directly passing the token to login(). If you do so, be careful when sharing your notebook. It is best practice to load the token from a secure vault instead of saving it in plain in your Colaboratory notebook.

Upload a file

Once you’ve created a repository with create_repo(), you can upload a file to your repository using upload_file().

Specify the path of the file to upload, where you want to upload the file to in the repository, and the name of the repository you want to add the file to. Depending on your repository type, you can optionally set the repository type as a dataset, model, or space.

>>> from huggingface_hub import HfApi
>>> api = HfApi()
>>> api.upload_file(
...     path_or_fileobj="/path/to/local/folder/README.md",
...     path_in_repo="README.md",
...     repo_id="username/test-dataset",
...     repo_type="dataset",
... )

Upload a folder

Use the upload_folder() function to upload a local folder to an existing repository. Specify the path of the local folder to upload, where you want to upload the folder to in the repository, and the name of the repository you want to add the folder to. Depending on your repository type, you can optionally set the repository type as a dataset, model, or space.

>>> from huggingface_hub import HfApi
>>> api = HfApi()

# Upload all the content from the local folder to your remote Space.
# By default, files are uploaded at the root of the repo
>>> api.upload_folder(
...     folder_path="/path/to/local/space",
...     repo_id="username/my-cool-space",
...     repo_type="space",
... )

Use the allow_patterns and ignore_patterns arguments to specify which files to upload. These parameters accept either a single pattern or a list of patterns. Patterns are Standard Wildcards (globbing patterns) as documented here. If both allow_patterns and ignore_patterns are provided, both constraints apply. By default, all files from the folder are uploaded.

Any .git/ folder present in any subdirectory will be ignored. However, please be aware that the .gitignore file is not taken into account. This means you must use allow_patterns and ignore_patterns to specify which files to upload instead.

>>> api.upload_folder(
...     folder_path="/path/to/local/folder",
...     path_in_repo="my-dataset/train", # Upload to a specific folder
...     repo_id="username/test-dataset",
...     repo_type="dataset",
...     ignore_patterns="**/logs/*.txt", # Ignore all text logs
... )

You can also use the delete_patterns argument to specify files you want to delete from the repo in the same commit. This can prove useful if you want to clean a remote folder before pushing files in it and you don’t know which files already exists.

The example below uploads the local ./logs folder to the remote /experiment/logs/ folder. Only txt files are uploaded but before that, all previous logs on the repo on deleted. All of this in a single commit.

>>> api.upload_folder(
...     folder_path="/path/to/local/folder/logs",
...     repo_id="username/trained-model",
...     path_in_repo="experiment/logs/",
...     allow_patterns="*.txt", # Upload all local text files
...     delete_patterns="*.txt", # Delete all remote text files before
... )

Upload from the CLI

You can use the huggingface-cli upload command from the terminal to directly upload files to the Hub. Internally it uses the same upload_file() and upload_folder() helpers described above.

You can either upload a single file or an entire folder:

# Usage:  huggingface-cli upload [repo_id] [local_path] [path_in_repo]
>>> huggingface-cli upload Wauplin/my-cool-model ./models/model.safetensors model.safetensors
https://huggingface.co/Wauplin/my-cool-model/blob/main/model.safetensors

>>> huggingface-cli upload Wauplin/my-cool-model ./models .
https://huggingface.co/Wauplin/my-cool-model/tree/main

local_path and path_in_repo are optional and can be implicitly inferred. If local_path is not set, the tool will check if a local folder or file has the same name as the repo_id. If that’s the case, its content will be uploaded. Otherwise, an exception is raised asking the user to explicitly set local_path. In any case, if path_in_repo is not set, files are uploaded at the root of the repo.

# Upload file at root
huggingface-cli upload my-cool-model model.safetensors

# Upload directory at root
huggingface-cli upload my-cool-model ./models

# Upload `my-cool-model/` directory if it exist, raise otherwise
huggingface-cli upload my-cool-model

By default, the token saved locally (using huggingface-cli login) will be used. If you want to authenticate explicitly, use the --token option:

huggingface-cli upload my-cool-model --token=hf_****

When uploading a folder, you can use the --include and --exclude arguments to filter the files to upload. You can also use --delete to delete existing files on the Hub.

# Sync local Space with Hub (upload new files except from logs/, delete removed files)
huggingface-cli upload Wauplin/space-example --repo-type=space --exclude="/logs/*" --delete="*" --commit-message="Sync local Space with Hub"

Finally, you can also schedule a job that will upload your files regularly (see scheduled uploads).

# Upload new logs every 10 minutes
huggingface-cli upload training-model logs/ --every=10

Advanced features

In most cases, you won’t need more than upload_file() and upload_folder() to upload your files to the Hub. However, huggingface_hub has more advanced features to make things easier. Let’s have a look at them!

Non-blocking uploads

In some cases, you want to push data without blocking your main thread. This is particularly useful to upload logs and artifacts while continuing a training. To do so, you can use the run_as_future argument in both upload_file() and upload_folder(). This will return a concurrent.futures.Future object that you can use to check the status of the upload.

>>> from huggingface_hub import HfApi
>>> api = HfApi()
>>> future = api.upload_folder( # Upload in the background (non-blocking action)
...     repo_id="username/my-model",
...     folder_path="checkpoints-001",
...     run_as_future=True,
... )
>>> future
Future(...)
>>> future.done()
False
>>> future.result() # Wait for the upload to complete (blocking action)
...

Even though background jobs are mostly useful to upload data/create commits, you can queue any method you like using run_as_future(). For instance, you can use it to create a repo and then upload data to it in the background. The built-in run_as_future argument in upload methods is just an alias around it.

>>> from huggingface_hub import HfApi
>>> api = HfApi()
>>> api.run_as_future(api.create_repo, "username/my-model", exists_ok=True)
Future(...)
>>> api.upload_file(
...     repo_id="username/my-model",
...     path_in_repo="file.txt",
...     path_or_fileobj=b"file content",
...     run_as_future=True,
... )
Future(...)

Upload a folder by chunks

upload_folder() makes it easy to upload an entire folder to the Hub. However, for large folders (thousands of files or hundreds of GB), it can still be challenging. If you have a folder with a lot of files, you might want to upload it in several commits. If you experience an error or a connection issue during the upload, you would not have to resume the process from the beginning.

To upload a folder in multiple commits, just pass multi_commits=True as argument. Under the hood, huggingface_hub will list the files to upload/delete and split them in several commits. The “strategy” (i.e. how to split the commits) is based on the number and size of the files to upload. A PR is open on the Hub to push all the commits. Once the PR is ready, the commits are squashed into a single commit. If the process is interrupted before completing, you can rerun your script to resume the upload. The created PR will be automatically detected and the upload will resume from where it stopped. It is recommended to pass multi_commits_verbose=True to get a better understanding of the upload and its progress.

The example below will upload the checkpoints folder to a dataset in multiple commits. A PR will be created on the Hub and merged automatically once the upload is complete. If you prefer the PR to stay open and review it manually, you can pass create_pr=True.

>>> upload_folder(
...     folder_path="local/checkpoints",
...     repo_id="username/my-dataset",
...     repo_type="dataset",
...     multi_commits=True,
...     multi_commits_verbose=True,
... )

If you want a better control on the upload strategy (i.e. the commits that are created), you can have a look at the low-level plan_multi_commits() and create_commits_on_pr() methods.

Scheduled uploads

The Model Database Hub makes it easy to save and version data. However, there are some limitations when updating the same file thousands of times. For instance, you might want to save logs of a training process or user feedback on a deployed Space. In these cases, uploading the data as a dataset on the Hub makes sense, but it can be hard to do properly. The main reason is that you don’t want to version every update of your data because it’ll make the git repository unusable. The CommitScheduler class offers a solution to this problem.

The idea is to run a background job that regularly pushes a local folder to the Hub. Let’s assume you have a Gradio Space that takes as input some text and generates two translations of it. Then, the user can select their preferred translation. For each run, you want to save the input, output, and user preference to analyze the results. This is a perfect use case for CommitScheduler; you want to save data to the Hub (potentially millions of user feedback), but you don’t need to save in real-time each user’s input. Instead, you can save the data locally in a JSON file and upload it every 10 minutes. For example:

>>> import json
>>> import uuid
>>> from pathlib import Path
>>> import gradio as gr
>>> from huggingface_hub import CommitScheduler

# Define the file where to save the data. Use UUID to make sure not to overwrite existing data from a previous run.
>>> feedback_file = Path("user_feedback/") / f"data_{uuid.uuid4()}.json"
>>> feedback_folder = feedback_file.parent

# Schedule regular uploads. Remote repo and local folder are created if they don't already exist.
>>> scheduler = CommitScheduler(
...     repo_id="report-translation-feedback",
...     repo_type="dataset",
...     folder_path=feedback_folder,
...     path_in_repo="data",
...     every=10,
... )

# Define the function that will be called when the user submits its feedback (to be called in Gradio)
>>> def save_feedback(input_text:str, output_1: str, output_2:str, user_choice: int) -> None:
...     """
...     Append input/outputs and user feedback to a JSON Lines file using a thread lock to avoid concurrent writes from different users.
...     """
...     with scheduler.lock:
...         with feedback_file.open("a") as f:
...             f.write(json.dumps({"input": input_text, "output_1": output_1, "output_2": output_2, "user_choice": user_choice}))
...             f.write("\n")

# Start Gradio
>>> with gr.Blocks() as demo:
>>>     ... # define Gradio demo + use `save_feedback`
>>> demo.launch()

And that’s it! User input/outputs and feedback will be available as a dataset on the Hub. By using a unique JSON file name, you are guaranteed you won’t overwrite data from a previous run or data from another Spaces/replicas pushing concurrently to the same repository.

For more details about the CommitScheduler, here is what you need to know:

• append-only: It is assumed that you will only add content to the folder. You must only append data to existing files or create new files. Deleting or overwriting a file might corrupt your repository.
• git history: The scheduler will commit the folder every every minutes. To avoid polluting the git repository too much, it is recommended to set a minimal value of 5 minutes. Besides, the scheduler is designed to avoid empty commits. If no new content is detected in the folder, the scheduled commit is dropped.
• errors: The scheduler run as background thread. It is started when you instantiate the class and never stops. In particular, if an error occurs during the upload (example: connection issue), the scheduler will silently ignore it and retry at the next scheduled commit.
• thread-safety: In most cases it is safe to assume that you can write to a file without having to worry about a lock file. The scheduler will not crash or be corrupted if you write content to the folder while it’s uploading. In practice, it is possible that concurrency issues happen for heavy-loaded apps. In this case, we advice to use the scheduler.lock lock to ensure thread-safety. The lock is blocked only when the scheduler scans the folder for changes, not when it uploads data. You can safely assume that it will not affect the user experience on your Space.

Space persistence demo

Persisting data from a Space to a Dataset on the Hub is the main use case for CommitScheduler. Depending on the use case, you might want to structure your data differently. The structure has to be robust to concurrent users and restarts which often implies generating UUIDs. Besides robustness, you should upload data in a format readable by the 🤗 Datasets library for later reuse. We created a Space that demonstrates how to save several different data formats (you may need to adapt it for your own specific needs).

Custom uploads

CommitScheduler assumes your data is append-only and should be uploading “as is”. However, you might want to customize the way data is uploaded. You can do that by creating a class inheriting from CommitScheduler and overwrite the push_to_hub method (feel free to overwrite it any way you want). You are guaranteed it will be called every every minutes in a background thread. You don’t have to worry about concurrency and errors but you must be careful about other aspects, such as pushing empty commits or duplicated data.

In the (simplified) example below, we overwrite push_to_hub to zip all PNG files in a single archive to avoid overloading the repo on the Hub:

class ZipScheduler(CommitScheduler):
    def push_to_hub(self):
        # 1. List PNG files
          png_files = list(self.folder_path.glob("*.png"))
          if len(png_files) == 0:
              return None  # return early if nothing to commit

        # 2. Zip png files in a single archive
        with tempfile.TemporaryDirectory() as tmpdir:
            archive_path = Path(tmpdir) / "train.zip"
            with zipfile.ZipFile(archive_path, "w", zipfile.ZIP_DEFLATED) as zip:
                for png_file in png_files:
                    zip.write(filename=png_file, arcname=png_file.name)

            # 3. Upload archive
            self.api.upload_file(..., path_or_fileobj=archive_path)

        # 4. Delete local png files to avoid re-uploading them later
        for png_file in png_files:
            png_file.unlink()

When you overwrite push_to_hub, you have access to the attributes of CommitScheduler and especially:

• HfApi client: api
• Folder parameters: folder_path and path_in_repo
• Repo parameters: repo_id, repo_type, revision
• The thread lock: lock

create_commit

The upload_file() and upload_folder() functions are high-level APIs that are generally convenient to use. We recommend trying these functions first if you don’t need to work at a lower level. However, if you want to work at a commit-level, you can use the create_commit() function directly.

There are two types of operations supported by create_commit():

• CommitOperationAdd uploads a file to the Hub. If the file already exists, the file contents are overwritten. This operation accepts two arguments:

  • path_in_repo: the repository path to upload a file to.
  • path_or_fileobj: either a path to a file on your filesystem or a file-like object. This is the content of the file to upload to the Hub.

• CommitOperationDelete removes a file or a folder from a repository. This operation accepts path_in_repo as an argument.

• CommitOperationCopy copies a file within a repository. This operation accepts three arguments:

  • src_path_in_repo: the repository path of the file to copy.
  • path_in_repo: the repository path where the file should be copied.
  • src_revision: optional - the revision of the file to copy if your want to copy a file from a different branch/revision.

For example, if you want to upload two files and delete a file in a Hub repository:

1. Use the appropriate CommitOperation to add or delete a file and to delete a folder:

>>> from huggingface_hub import HfApi, CommitOperationAdd, CommitOperationDelete
>>> api = HfApi()
>>> operations = [
...     CommitOperationAdd(path_in_repo="LICENSE.md", path_or_fileobj="~/repo/LICENSE.md"),
...     CommitOperationAdd(path_in_repo="weights.h5", path_or_fileobj="~/repo/weights-final.h5"),
...     CommitOperationDelete(path_in_repo="old-weights.h5"),
...     CommitOperationDelete(path_in_repo="logs/"),
...     CommitOperationCopy(src_path_in_repo="image.png", path_in_repo="duplicate_image.png"),
... ]

2. Pass your operations to create_commit():

>>> api.create_commit(
...     repo_id="lysandre/test-model",
...     operations=operations,
...     commit_message="Upload my model weights and license",
... )

In addition to upload_file() and upload_folder(), the following functions also use create_commit() under the hood:

• delete_file() deletes a single file from a repository on the Hub.
• delete_folder() deletes an entire folder from a repository on the Hub.
• metadata_update() updates a repository’s metadata.

For more detailed information, take a look at the HfApi reference.

Tips and tricks for large uploads

There are some limitations to be aware of when dealing with a large amount of data in your repo. Given the time it takes to stream the data, getting an upload/push to fail at the end of the process or encountering a degraded experience, be it on hf.co or when working locally, can be very annoying. We gathered a list of tips and recommendations for structuring your repo.

* Not relevant when using git CLI directly

Please read the next section to understand better those limits and how to deal with them.

Hub repository size limitations

What are we talking about when we say “large uploads”, and what are their associated limitations? Large uploads can be very diverse, from repositories with a few huge files (e.g. model weights) to repositories with thousands of small files (e.g. an image dataset).

Under the hood, the Hub uses Git to version the data, which has structural implications on what you can do in your repo. If your repo is crossing some of the numbers mentioned in the previous section, we strongly encourage you to check out git-sizer, which has very detailed documentation about the different factors that will impact your experience. Here is a TL;DR of factors to consider:

• Repository size: The total size of the data you’re planning to upload. There is no hard limit on a Hub repository size. However, if you plan to upload hundreds of GBs or even TBs of data, we would appreciate it if you could let us know in advance so we can better help you if you have any questions during the process. You can contact us at [email protected] or on our Discord.
• Number of files:
  • For optimal experience, we recommend keeping the total number of files under 100k. Try merging the data into fewer files if you have more. For example, json files can be merged into a single jsonl file, or large datasets can be exported as Parquet files.
  • The maximum number of files per folder cannot exceed 10k files per folder. A simple solution is to create a repository structure that uses subdirectories. For example, a repo with 1k folders from 000/ to 999/, each containing at most 1000 files, is already enough.
• File size: In the case of uploading large files (e.g. model weights), we strongly recommend splitting them into chunks of around 5GB each. There are a few reasons for this:
  • Uploading and downloading smaller files is much easier both for you and the other users. Connection issues can always happen when streaming data and smaller files avoid resuming from the beginning in case of errors.
  • Files are served to the users using CloudFront. From our experience, huge files are not cached by this service leading to a slower download speed. In all cases no single LFS file will be able to be >50GB. I.e. 50GB is the hard limit for single file size.
• Number of commits: There is no hard limit for the total number of commits on your repo history. However, from our experience, the user experience on the Hub starts to degrade after a few thousand commits. We are constantly working to improve the service, but one must always remember that a git repository is not meant to work as a database with a lot of writes. If your repo’s history gets very large, it is always possible to squash all the commits to get a fresh start using super_squash_history(). This is a non-revertible operation.
• Number of operations per commit: Once again, there is no hard limit here. When a commit is uploaded on the Hub, each git operation (addition or delete) is checked by the server. When a hundred LFS files are committed at once, each file is checked individually to ensure it’s been correctly uploaded. When pushing data through HTTP with huggingface_hub, a timeout of 60s is set on the request, meaning that if the process takes more time, an error is raised client-side. However, it can happen (in rare cases) that even if the timeout is raised client-side, the process is still completed server-side. This can be checked manually by browsing the repo on the Hub. To prevent this timeout, we recommend adding around 50-100 files per commit.

Practical tips

Now that we’ve seen the technical aspects you must consider when structuring your repository, let’s see some practical tips to make your upload process as smooth as possible.

• Start small: We recommend starting with a small amount of data to test your upload script. It’s easier to iterate on a script when failing takes only a little time.
• Expect failures: Streaming large amounts of data is challenging. You don’t know what can happen, but it’s always best to consider that something will fail at least once -no matter if it’s due to your machine, your connection, or our servers. For example, if you plan to upload a large number of files, it’s best to keep track locally of which files you already uploaded before uploading the next batch. You are ensured that an LFS file that is already committed will never be re-uploaded twice but checking it client-side can still save some time.
• Use hf_transfer: this is a Rust-based library meant to speed up uploads on machines with very high bandwidth. To use it, you must install it (pip install hf_transfer) and enable it by setting HF_HUB_ENABLE_HF_TRANSFER=1 as an environment variable. You can then use huggingface_hub normally. Disclaimer: this is a power user tool. It is tested and production-ready but lacks user-friendly features like progress bars or advanced error handling.

(legacy) Upload files with Git LFS

All the methods described above use the Hub’s API to upload files. This is the recommended way to upload files to the Hub. However, we also provide Repository, a wrapper around the git tool to manage a local repository.

Git LFS automatically handles files larger than 10MB. But for very large files (>5GB), you need to install a custom transfer agent for Git LFS:

huggingface-cli lfs-enable-largefiles

You should install this for each repository that has a very large file. Once installed, you’ll be able to push files larger than 5GB.

commit context manager

The commit context manager handles four of the most common Git commands: pull, add, commit, and push. git-lfs automatically tracks any file larger than 10MB. In the following example, the commit context manager:

1. Pulls from the text-files repository.
2. Adds a change made to file.txt.
3. Commits the change.
4. Pushes the change to the text-files repository.

>>> from huggingface_hub import Repository
>>> with Repository(local_dir="text-files", clone_from="<user>/text-files").commit(commit_message="My first file :)"):
...     with open("file.txt", "w+") as f:
...         f.write(json.dumps({"hey": 8}))

Here is another example of how to use the commit context manager to save and upload a file to a repository:

>>> import torch
>>> model = torch.nn.Transformer()
>>> with Repository("torch-model", clone_from="<user>/torch-model", token=True).commit(commit_message="My cool model :)"):
...     torch.save(model.state_dict(), "model.pt")

Set blocking=False if you would like to push your commits asynchronously. Non-blocking behavior is helpful when you want to continue running your script while your commits are being pushed.

>>> with repo.commit(commit_message="My cool model :)", blocking=False)

You can check the status of your push with the command_queue method:

>>> last_command = repo.command_queue[-1]
>>> last_command.status

Refer to the table below for the possible statuses:

When blocking=False, commands are tracked, and your script will only exit when all pushes are completed, even if other errors occur in your script. Some additional useful commands for checking the status of a push include:

# Inspect an error.
>>> last_command.stderr

# Check whether a push is completed or ongoing.
>>> last_command.is_done

# Check whether a push command has errored.
>>> last_command.failed

push_to_hub

The Repository class has a push_to_hub() function to add files, make a commit, and push them to a repository. Unlike the commit context manager, you’ll need to pull from a repository first before calling push_to_hub().

For example, if you’ve already cloned a repository from the Hub, then you can initialize the repo from the local directory:

>>> from huggingface_hub import Repository
>>> repo = Repository(local_dir="path/to/local/repo")

Update your local clone with git_pull() and then push your file to the Hub:

>>> repo.git_pull()
>>> repo.push_to_hub(commit_message="Commit my-awesome-file to the Hub")

However, if you aren’t ready to push a file yet, you can use git_add() and git_commit() to only add and commit your file:

>>> repo.git_add("path/to/file")
>>> repo.git_commit(commit_message="add my first model config file :)")

When you’re ready, push the file to your repository with git_push():

>>> repo.git_push()