Create and manage a repository

The Hugging Face Hub is a collection of git repositories. Git is a widely used tool in software development to easily version projects when working collaboratively. This guide will show you how to interact with the repositories on the Hub, especially:

• Create and delete a repository.
• Manage branches and tags.
• Rename your repository.
• Update your repository visibility.
• Manage a local copy of your repository.

If you want to create and manage a repository on the Hub, your machine must be logged in. If you are not, please refer to this section. In the rest of this guide, we will assume that your machine is logged in.

Repo creation and deletion

The first step is to know how to create and delete repositories. You can only manage repositories that you own (under your username namespace) or from organizations in which you have write permissions.

Create a repository

Create an empty repository with create_repo() and give it a name with the repo_id parameter. The repo_id is your namespace followed by the repository name: username_or_org/repo_name.

>>> from huggingface_hub import create_repo
>>> create_repo("lysandre/test-model")
'https://huggingface.co/lysandre/test-model'

By default, create_repo() creates a model repository. But you can use the repo_type parameter to specify another repository type. For example, if you want to create a dataset repository:

>>> from huggingface_hub import create_repo
>>> create_repo("lysandre/test-dataset", repo_type="dataset")
'https://huggingface.co/datasets/lysandre/test-dataset'

When you create a repository, you can set your repository visibility with the private parameter.

>>> from huggingface_hub import create_repo
>>> create_repo("lysandre/test-private", private=True)

If you want to change the repository visibility at a later time, you can use the update_repo_visibility() function.

Delete a repository

Delete a repository with delete_repo(). Make sure you want to delete a repository because this is an irreversible process!

Specify the repo_id of the repository you want to delete:

>>> delete_repo(repo_id="lysandre/my-corrupted-dataset", repo_type="dataset")

Duplicate a repository (only for Spaces)

In some cases, you want to copy someone else’s repo to adapt it to your use case. This is possible for Spaces using the duplicate_space() method. It will duplicate the whole repository. You will still need to configure your own settings (hardware, sleep-time, storage, variables and secrets). Check out our Manage your Space guide for more details.

>>> from huggingface_hub import duplicate_space
>>> duplicate_space("multimodalart/dreambooth-training", private=False)
RepoUrl('https://huggingface.co/spaces/nateraw/dreambooth-training',...)

Upload and download files

Now that you have created your repository, you are interested in pushing changes to it and downloading files from it.

These 2 topics deserve their own guides. Please refer to the upload and the download guides to learn how to use your repository.

Branches and tags

Git repositories often make use of branches to store different versions of a same repository. Tags can also be used to flag a specific state of your repository, for example, when releasing a version. More generally, branches and tags are referred as git references.

Create branches and tags

You can create new branch and tags using create_branch() and create_tag():

>>> from huggingface_hub import create_branch, create_tag

# Create a branch on a Space repo from `main` branch
>>> create_branch("Matthijs/speecht5-tts-demo", repo_type="space", branch="handle-dog-speaker")

# Create a tag on a Dataset repo from `v0.1-release` branch
>>> create_branch("bigcode/the-stack", repo_type="dataset", revision="v0.1-release", tag="v0.1.1", tag_message="Bump release version.")

You can use the delete_branch() and delete_tag() functions in the same way to delete a branch or a tag.

List all branches and tags

You can also list the existing git refs from a repository using list_repo_refs():

>>> from huggingface_hub import list_repo_refs
>>> list_repo_refs("bigcode/the-stack", repo_type="dataset")
GitRefs(
   branches=[
         GitRefInfo(name='main', ref='refs/heads/main', target_commit='18edc1591d9ce72aa82f56c4431b3c969b210ae3'),
         GitRefInfo(name='v1.1.a1', ref='refs/heads/v1.1.a1', target_commit='f9826b862d1567f3822d3d25649b0d6d22ace714')
   ],
   converts=[],
   tags=[
         GitRefInfo(name='v1.0', ref='refs/tags/v1.0', target_commit='c37a8cd1e382064d8aced5e05543c5f7753834da')
   ]
)

Change repository settings

Repositories come with some settings that you can configure. Most of the time, you will want to do that manually in the repo settings page in your browser. You must have write access to a repo to configure it (either own it or being part of an organization). In this section, we will see the settings that you can also configure programmatically using huggingface_hub.

Some settings are specific to Spaces (hardware, environment variables,…). To configure those, please refer to our Manage your Spaces guide.

Update visibility

A repository can be public or private. A private repository is only visible to you or members of the organization in which the repository is located. Change a repository to private as shown in the following:

>>> from huggingface_hub import update_repo_visibility
>>> update_repo_visibility(repo_id=repo_id, private=True)

Rename your repository

You can rename your repository on the Hub using move_repo(). Using this method, you can also move the repo from a user to an organization. When doing so, there are a few limitations that you should be aware of. For example, you can’t transfer your repo to another user.

>>> from huggingface_hub import move_repo
>>> move_repo(from_id="Wauplin/cool-model", to_id="huggingface/cool-model")

Manage a local copy of your repository

All the actions described above can be done using HTTP requests. However, in some cases you might be interested in having a local copy of your repository and interact with it using the Git commands you are familiar with.

The Repository class allows you to interact with files and repositories on the Hub with functions similar to Git commands. It is a wrapper over Git and Git-LFS methods to use the Git commands you already know and love. Before starting, please make sure you have Git-LFS installed (see here for installation instructions).

Use a local repository

Instantiate a Repository object with a path to a local repository:

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

Clone

The clone_from parameter clones a repository from a Hugging Face repository ID to a local directory specified by the local_dir argument:

>>> from huggingface_hub import Repository
>>> repo = Repository(local_dir="w2v2", clone_from="facebook/wav2vec2-large-960h-lv60")

clone_from can also clone a repository using a URL:

>>> repo = Repository(local_dir="huggingface-hub", clone_from="https://huggingface.co/facebook/wav2vec2-large-960h-lv60")

You can combine the clone_from parameter with create_repo() to create and clone a repository:

>>> repo_url = create_repo(repo_id="repo_name")
>>> repo = Repository(local_dir="repo_local_path", clone_from=repo_url)

You can also configure a Git username and email to a cloned repository by specifying the git_user and git_email parameters when you clone a repository. When users commit to that repository, Git will be aware of the commit author.

>>> repo = Repository(
...   "my-dataset",
...   clone_from="<user>/<dataset_id>",
...   token=True,
...   repo_type="dataset",
...   git_user="MyName",
...   git_email="me@cool.mail"
... )

Branch

Branches are important for collaboration and experimentation without impacting your current files and code. Switch between branches with git_checkout(). For example, if you want to switch from branch1 to branch2:

>>> from huggingface_hub import Repository
>>> repo = Repository(local_dir="huggingface-hub", clone_from="<user>/<dataset_id>", revision='branch1')
>>> repo.git_checkout("branch2")

Pull

git_pull() allows you to update a current local branch with changes from a remote repository:

>>> from huggingface_hub import Repository
>>> repo.git_pull()

Set rebase=True if you want your local commits to occur after your branch is updated with the new commits from the remote:

>>> repo.git_pull(rebase=True)