Environment variables

huggingface_hub can be configured using environment variables.

If you are unfamiliar with environment variable, here are generic articles about them on macOS and Linux and on Windows.

This page will guide you through all environment variables specific to huggingface_hub and their meaning.

Generic

HF_INFERENCE_ENDPOINT

To configure the inference api base url. You might want to set this variable if your organization is pointing at an API Gateway rather than directly at the inference api.

Defaults to "https://api-inference.huggingface.com".

HF_HOME

To configure where huggingface_hub will locally store data. In particular, your token and the cache will be stored in this folder.

Defaults to "~/.cache/huggingface" unless XDG_CACHE_HOME is set.

HF_HUB_CACHE

To configure where repositories from the Hub will be cached locally (models, datasets and spaces).

Defaults to "$HF_HOME/hub" (e.g. "~/.cache/huggingface/hub" by default).

HF_ASSETS_CACHE

To configure where assets created by downstream libraries will be cached locally. Those assets can be preprocessed data, files downloaded from GitHub, logs,…

Defaults to "$HF_HOME/assets" (e.g. "~/.cache/huggingface/assets" by default).

HF_TOKEN

To configure the User Access Token to authenticate to the Hub. If set, this value will overwrite the token stored on the machine (in "$HF_HOME/token").

See login reference for more details.

HF_HUB_VERBOSITY

Set the verbosity level of the huggingface_hub’s logger. Must be one of {"debug", "info", "warning", "error", "critical"}.

Defaults to "warning".

For more details, see logging reference.

HF_HUB_LOCAL_DIR_AUTO_SYMLINK_THRESHOLD

Integer value to define under which size a file is considered as “small”. When downloading files to a local directory, small files will be duplicated to ease user experience while bigger files are symlinked to save disk usage.

For more details, see the download guide.

HF_HUB_ETAG_TIMEOUT

Integer value to define the number of seconds to wait for server response when fetching the latest metadata from a repo before downloading a file. If the request times out, huggingface_hub will default to the locally cached files. Setting a lower value speeds up the workflow for machines with a slow connection that have already cached files. A higher value guarantees the metadata call to succeed in more cases. Default to 10s.

HF_HUB_DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT

Integer value to define the number of seconds to wait for server response when downloading a file. If the request times out, a TimeoutError is raised. Setting a higher value is beneficial on machine with a slow connection. A smaller value makes the process fail quicker in case of complete network outage. Default to 10s.

Boolean values

The following environment variables expect a boolean value. The variable will be considered as True if its value is one of {"1", "ON", "YES", "TRUE"} (case-insensitive). Any other value (or undefined) will be considered as False.

HF_HUB_OFFLINE

If set, no HTTP calls will me made when trying to fetch files. Only files that are already cached will be accessed. This is useful in case your network is slow and you don’t care about having absolutely the latest version of a file.

Note: even if the latest version of a file is cached, calling hf_hub_download still triggers a HTTP request to check that a new version is not available. Setting HF_HUB_OFFLINE=1 will skip this call which speeds up your loading time.

HF_HUB_DISABLE_IMPLICIT_TOKEN

Authentication is not mandatory for every requests to the Hub. For instance, requesting details about "gpt2" model does not require to be authenticated. However, if a user is logged in, the default behavior will be to always send the token in order to ease user experience (never get a HTTP 401 Unauthorized) when accessing private or gated repositories. For privacy, you can disable this behavior by setting HF_HUB_DISABLE_IMPLICIT_TOKEN=1. In this case, the token will be sent only for “write-access” calls (example: create a commit).

Note: disabling implicit sending of token can have weird side effects. For example, if you want to list all models on the Hub, your private models will not be listed. You would need to explicitly pass token=True argument in your script.

HF_HUB_DISABLE_PROGRESS_BARS

For time consuming tasks, huggingface_hub displays a progress bar by default (using tqdm). You can disable all the progress bars at once by setting HF_HUB_DISABLE_PROGRESS_BARS=1.

HF_HUB_DISABLE_SYMLINKS_WARNING

If you are on a Windows machine, it is recommended to enable the developer mode or to run huggingface_hub in admin mode. If not, huggingface_hub will not be able to create symlinks in your cache system. You will be able to execute any script but your user experience will be degraded as some huge files might end-up duplicated on your hard-drive. A warning message is triggered to warn you about this behavior. Set HF_HUB_DISABLE_SYMLINKS_WARNING=1, to disable this warning.

For more details, see cache limitations.

HF_HUB_DISABLE_EXPERIMENTAL_WARNING

Some features of huggingface_hub are experimental. This means you can use them but we do not guarantee they will be maintained in the future. In particular, we might update the API or behavior of such features without any deprecation cycle. A warning message is triggered when using an experimental feature to warn you about it. If you’re comfortable debugging any potential issues using an experimental feature, you can set HF_HUB_DISABLE_EXPERIMENTAL_WARNING=1 to disable the warning.

If you are using an experimental feature, please let us know! Your feedback can help us design and improve it.

HF_HUB_DISABLE_TELEMETRY

By default, some data is collected by HF libraries (transformers, datasets, gradio,..) to monitor usage, debug issues and help prioritize features. Each library defines its own policy (i.e. which usage to monitor) but the core implementation happens in huggingface_hub (see send_telemetry).

You can set HF_HUB_DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1 as environment variable to globally disable telemetry.

HF_HUB_ENABLE_HF_TRANSFER

Set to True for faster uploads and downloads from the Hub using hf_transfer.

By default, huggingface_hub uses the Python-based requests.get and requests.post functions. Although these are reliable and versatile, they may not be the most efficient choice for machines with high bandwidth. hf_transfer is a Rust-based package developed to maximize the bandwidth used by dividing large files into smaller parts and transferring them simultaneously using multiple threads. This approach can potentially double the transfer speed. To use hf_transfer, you need to install it separately from PyPI and set HF_HUB_ENABLE_HF_TRANSFER=1 as an environment variable.

Please note that using hf_transfer comes with certain limitations. Since it is not purely Python-based, debugging errors may be challenging. Additionally, hf_transfer lacks several user-friendly features such as resumable downloads and proxies. These omissions are intentional to maintain the simplicity and speed of the Rust logic. Consequently, hf_transfer is not enabled by default in huggingface_hub.

Deprecated environment variables

In order to standardize all environment variables within the Hugging Face ecosystem, some variables have been marked as deprecated. Although they remain functional, they no longer take precedence over their replacements. The following table outlines the deprecated variables and their corresponding alternatives:

Deprecated Variable	Replacement
HUGGINGFACE_HUB_CACHE	HF_HUB_CACHE
HUGGINGFACE_ASSETS_CACHE	HF_ASSETS_CACHE
HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN	HF_TOKEN
HUGGINGFACE_HUB_VERBOSITY	HF_HUB_VERBOSITY

From external tools

Some environment variables are not specific to huggingface_hub but are still taken into account when they are set.

NO_COLOR

Boolean value. When set, huggingface-cli tool will not print any ANSI color. See no-color.org.

XDG_CACHE_HOME

Used only when HF_HOME is not set!

This is the default way to configure where user-specific non-essential (cached) data should be written on linux machines.

If HF_HOME is not set, the default home will be "$XDG_CACHE_HOME/huggingface" instead of "~/.cache/huggingface".