Download files
Last updated
Last updated
The boincai_hub library provides functions to download files from the repositories stored on the Hub. You can use these functions independently or integrate them into your own library, making it more convenient for your users to interact with the Hub. This guide will show you how to:
Download and cache a single file.
Download and cache an entire repository.
Download files to a local folder.
The function is the main function for downloading files from the Hub. It downloads the remote file, caches it on disk (in a version-aware way), and returns its local file path.
The returned filepath is a pointer to the HF local cache. Therefore, it is important to not modify the file to avoid having a corrupted cache. If you are interested in getting to know more about how files are cached, please refer to our .
Select the file to download using the repo_id, repo_type and filename parameters. By default, the file will be considered as being part of a model repo.
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By default, the latest version from the main branch is downloaded. However, in some cases you want to download a file at a particular version (e.g. from a specific branch, a PR, a tag or a commit hash). To do so, use the revision parameter:
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Note: When using the commit hash, it must be the full-length hash instead of a 7-character commit hash.
To download a whole repository, just pass the repo_id and repo_type:
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For example, you can use allow_patterns to only download JSON configuration files:
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On the other hand, ignore_patterns can exclude certain files from being downloaded. The following example ignores the .msgpack and .h5 file extensions:
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Finally, you can combine both to precisely filter your download. Here is an example to download all json and markdown files except vocab.json.
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However, in some cases you want to download files and move them to a specific folder. This is useful to get a workflow closer to what git commands offer. You can do that using the local_dir and local_dir_use_symlinks parameters:
local_dir must be a path to a folder on your system. The downloaded files will keep the same file structure as in the repo. For example if filename="data/train.csv" and local_dir="path/to/folder", then the returned filepath will be "path/to/folder/data/train.csv".
local_dir_use_symlinks defines how the file must be saved in your local folder.
The default behavior ("auto") is to duplicate small files (<5MB) and use symlinks for bigger files. Symlinks allow to optimize both bandwidth and disk usage. However manually editing a symlinked file might corrupt the cache, hence the duplication for small files. The 5MB threshold can be configured with the HF_HUB_LOCAL_DIR_AUTO_SYMLINK_THRESHOLD environment variable.
If local_dir_use_symlinks=True is set, all files are symlinked for an optimal disk space optimization. This is for example useful when downloading a huge dataset with thousands of small files.
Finally, if you don’t want symlinks at all you can disable them (local_dir_use_symlinks=False). The cache directory will still be used to check wether the file is already cached or not. If already cached, the file is duplicated from the cache (i.e. saves bandwidth but increases disk usage). If the file is not already cached, it will be downloaded and moved directly to the local dir. This means that if you need to reuse it somewhere else later, it will be re-downloaded.
Here is a table that summarizes the different options to help you choose the parameters that best suit your use case.
local_dir=None
symlink in cache
✅
❌ (save would corrupt the cache)
✅
✅
local_dir="path/to/folder"
local_dir_use_symlinks="auto"
file or symlink in folder
✅
✅ (for small files) ⚠️ (for big files do not resolve path before saving)
✅
✅
local_dir="path/to/folder"
local_dir_use_symlinks=True
symlink in folder
✅
⚠️ (do not resolve path before saving)
✅
✅
local_dir="path/to/folder"
local_dir_use_symlinks=False
No
file in folder
✅
✅
❌ (if re-run, file is re-downloaded)
⚠️ (multiple copies if ran in multiple folders)
local_dir="path/to/folder"
local_dir_use_symlinks=False
Yes
file in folder
✅
✅
⚠️ (file has to be cached first)
❌ (file is duplicated)
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By default, the token saved locally (using boincai-cli login) will be used. If you want to authenticate explicitly, use the --token option:
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You can download multiple files at once which displays a progress bar and returns the snapshot path in which the files are located:
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If you want to silence the progress bars and potential warnings, use the --quiet option. This can prove useful if you want to pass the output to another command in a script.
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By default, files are downloaded to the cache directory defined by HF_HOME environment variable (or ~/.cache/boincai/hub if not specified). You can override this by using the --cache-dir option:
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There are more arguments you can specify to download from different repo types or revisions and to include/exclude files to download using glob patterns:
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For a full list of the arguments, you can run:
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In case you want to construct the URL used to download a file from a repo, you can use which returns a URL. Note that it is used internally by .
downloads an entire repository at a given revision. It uses internally which means all downloaded files are also cached on your local disk. Downloads are made concurrently to speed-up the process.
downloads the latest revision by default. If you want a specific repository revision, use the revision parameter:
provides an easy way to download a repository. However, you don’t always want to download the entire content of a repository. For example, you might want to prevent downloading all .bin files if you know you’ll only use the .safetensors weights. You can do that using allow_patterns and ignore_patterns parameters.
These parameters accept either a single pattern or a list of patterns. Patterns are Standard Wildcards (globbing patterns) as documented . The pattern matching is based on .
The recommended (and default) way to download files from the Hub is to use the . You can define your cache location by setting cache_dir parameter (both in and ).
Note: if you are on a Windows machine, you need to enable developer mode or run boincai_hub as admin to enable symlinks. Check out the section for more details.
You can use the boincai-cli download command from the terminal to directly download files from the Hub. Internally, it uses the same and helpers described above and prints the returned path to the terminal:
If you want to download files to a local folder, without the cache directory structure, you can use --local-dir. Downloading to a local folder comes with its limitations which are listed in this .
If you are running on a machine with high bandwidth, you can increase your download speed with , a Rust-based library developed to speed up file transfers with the Hub. To enable it, install the package (pip install hf_transfer) and set HF_HUB_ENABLE_HF_TRANSFER=1 as an environment variable.
hf_transfer is a power user tool! It is tested and production-ready, but it lacks user-friendly features like progress bars or advanced error handling. For more details, please take a look at this .