Say hello to hf: a faster, friendlier Hugging Face CLI β¨
We are glad to announce a long-awaited quality-of-life improvement: the Hugging Face CLI has been officially renamed from huggingface-cli to hf!
So... why this change?
Typing huggingface-cli constantly gets old fast. More importantly, the CLIβs command structure became messy as new features were added over time (upload, download, cache management, repo management, etc.). Renaming the CLI is a chance to reorganize commands into a clearer, more consistent format.
We decided not to reinvent the wheel and instead follow a well-known CLI pattern: hf <resource> <action>. Isn't hf auth login easier to type and remember?
We've moved over 20PB from Git LFS to Xet on the Hub without downtime or data loss. Having things "just work" on a migration of this scale is about as good as it gets.
In the early days of joining Hugging Face, we made a few key design decisions: * There would be no "hard cut-over" from Git LFS to Xet * A Xet-enabled repository should be able to contain both Xet and LFS files * Repository migrations from LFS to Xet can run in the background without disrupting downloads or uploads
These were largely driven by our desire to ensure the community could keep working without interruption.
We cover the infrastructure making this all go in this post, specifically: * An integral piece of infrastructure known internally as the Git LFS Bridge * Background content migrations that run around the clock