hf-hub-s3-mirror

An opt-in, S3-backed mirror for Hugging Face Hub model and dataset repositories. It publishes immutable, SHA-256-addressed blobs and a manifest for each pinned Hub commit, then exposes those files through the familiar huggingface_hub API. Downloads are verified and cached using the normal Hugging Face cache layout.

This is an early compatibility layer for huggingface_hub==1.33.0, datasets==5.0.1, and transformers==5.12.1. It patches their Hub-facing interfaces for the whole Python process. It is not a drop-in replacement for arbitrary versions or a general S3 filesystem.

Install

pip install hf-hub-s3-mirror

Before the first PyPI release, install this checkout locally with pip install .. The optional datasets and transformers extras install the tested versions:

pip install 'hf-hub-s3-mirror[datasets,transformers]'

The core dependencies use compatible version ranges, except for Hugging Face Hub: its version stays pinned because the adapter patches internal interfaces. The optional integrations also stay pinned to tested versions. In particular, datasets==5.0.1 requires fsspec<=2026.6.0, so installing the datasets extra selects fsspec==2026.6.0 even though the core package allows newer versions.

Publish a pinned Hub revision

hf-hub-s3-publish dataset 'ORG/NAME@REVISION' --bucket YOUR_BUCKET
hf-hub-s3-publish model 'ORG/NAME@REVISION' --bucket YOUR_BUCKET
hf-hub-s3-publish tokenizer 'ORG/NAME@REVISION' --bucket YOUR_BUCKET

tokenizer publishes only the files AutoTokenizer and AutoConfig read from a model repository (tokenizer and config JSON, vocabularies, chat templates, and remote-code *.py modules), not the weights. Every kind accepts --allow-patterns and --ignore-patterns with the same glob semantics as snapshot_download; for tokenizer, allow patterns add to its defaults. Publishing more files of an already published commit extends its manifest; a file that is already published must keep the same blob. Readers fail closed on any file the manifest does not list.

REVISION may be a branch, tag, or full commit; the publisher resolves it to an immutable commit and stores the commit in the manifest. You may pass --revision REVISION instead of using @REVISION. A revision is required; the publisher never silently defaults to main. For gated repositories, provide an authorized HF_TOKEN in the environment. AWS credentials come from the normal boto3 credential chain. Use --region to override the configured AWS region. --dry-run downloads and hashes the files without writing to S3.

Read a mirrored revision

Call install before importing huggingface_hub, datasets, or transformers:

from hf_hub_s3_mirror import install

install(bucket="YOUR_BUCKET", prefix="hf_hub")

from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download

path = hf_hub_download(
    "ORG/NAME", "config.json", revision="FULL_COMMIT_SHA"
)

Importing the package does not activate the mirror; only install does. bucket and prefix default to HF_S3_MIRROR_BUCKET and HF_S3_MIRROR_PREFIX when omitted. bucket may also be a function returning the name; it is called on the first S3 access, so install can run before the process knows, for example, its AWS region.

Installation always sets HF_HUB_DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1 to prevent upstream agent-registry lookups during cache-only reads.

By default installation disables public-Hub fallback: an absent mirrored repository, revision, or file fails instead of fetching it from the internet. It also sets HF_ENDPOINT=https://hf-mirror.invalid and HF_HUB_DISABLE_IMPLICIT_TOKEN=1 for the process and its child processes, so a Hub request that escapes the mirror fails without sending the implicit token. datasets still reads full https://huggingface.co/datasets/.../resolve/... URLs from the mirror and skips its download-count request.

To mirror only some repositories, set HF_S3_MIRROR_ALLOW_HUB_FALLBACK=1 or call install(..., allow_hub_fallback=True). For online downloads, repositories present in the mirror are read only from S3. Supported operations on other repositories use the Hub (including HF_ENDPOINT, tokens, and Xet). The mirror stays authoritative for the repositories it holds: a missing revision or file there still fails rather than reaching the Hub, so a gated repository is never requested upstream once it is mirrored.

With fallback enabled, local_files_only=True uses Hugging Face's local cache and local_dir handling without querying S3 or making HTTP requests.

Unsupported operations on mirrored repositories fail closed, including writes and public-Hub URL generation. Account-only helpers such as whoami remain available when fallback is enabled.

The runtime needs S3 GetObject and ListBucket access; publishing also needs PutObject. The package never embeds AWS credentials or dataset bytes.

Mirror layout

The publisher stores manifests under <prefix>/repos/{models|datasets}/ORG/NAME/snapshots/COMMIT/manifest.json, mutable revision refs under .../refs/, and shared immutable blobs under <prefix>/blobs/sha256/. The reader verifies blob sizes and SHA-256 hashes before placing them in the local Hugging Face cache.

HfFileSystem also verifies a complete file before returning any of its bytes. The first read downloads the whole file, even for a small requested range, and requires enough local cache space for it. Subsequent opens revalidate and reuse the cached blob; seek and partial reads operate on the verified local file.

Development

The implementation separates artifact validation, S3 access, verified caching, filesystem compatibility, and lazy datasets integration. The public downloads, Hub API adapter, and installation entry point remain in mirror.py.

Tests are grouped by contract in four modules: test_storage.py, test_api.py, test_filesystem.py, and test_integration.py. Shared fixtures live in conftest.py and _support.py. The integration tests publish fixture repositories and read their output through the real datasets and tokenizer libraries with network access blocked; they do not replace a smoke test against your S3 bucket.

The pre-commit hooks check whitespace, YAML/TOML, merge markers, file size, Ruff linting and formatting, and mypy. They use Python 3.12 for their isolated environments. CI runs the full suite on Python 3.11 and 3.12 with both the minimum direct runtime dependencies and the latest versions allowed by the package and its test extras. Each job checks dependency consistency and logs the resolved versions. The mypy hook keeps its own tested dependency pins.

The minimum runtime versions are pinned directly in the CI install step. Keep those pins aligned with the lower bounds in pyproject.toml. For local development:

python -m pip install -e '.[test]'
python -m pytest tests -q

uv tool install pre-commit==4.7.0
pre-commit install
pre-commit run --all-files

The full test suite remains a CI check rather than running on every commit.

Release status

The package has not been published to PyPI. Run the local tests and an end-to-end read with the intended S3 permissions before releasing it.

Releases follow the same PyPI Trusted Publishing pattern as fasttext-threaded: the tag-triggered workflow tests and builds an sdist plus a universal wheel, then publishes from a separate job using GitHub OIDC. No PyPI API token is stored in this repository.

Before the first release, configure the PyPI project's trusted publisher with owner dkajtoch, repository hf-hub-s3-mirror, workflow release.yaml, and GitHub environment pypi. Configure that environment to require approval. Then tag a commit on main matching the version in pyproject.toml (for example, v0.1.0a1). The workflow rejects tags whose version differs or whose commit is not on main. Creating the workflow alone does not publish anything.