How to contribute to huggingface_hub, the GitHub repository?

Everyone is welcome to contribute, and we value everybody's contribution. Code is not the only way to help the community. Answering questions, helping others, reaching out and improving the documentations are immensely valuable to the community.

It also helps us if you spread the word: reference the library from blog posts on the awesome projects it made possible, shout out on Twitter every time it has helped you, or simply star the repo to say "thank you".

Whichever way you choose to contribute, please be mindful to respect our code of conduct.

Looking for a good first issue to work on? Please check out our contributing guide below and then select an issue from our curated list. Pick one and get started with it!

The client library, huggingface_hub

This repository hosts the huggingface_hub, the client library that interfaces any Python script with the Hugging Face Hub. Its implementation lives in src/huggingface_hub while the tests are located in tests/.

There are many ways you can contribute to this client library:

• Fixing outstanding issues with the existing code;
• Contributing to the examples or to the documentation;
• Submitting issues related to bugs or desired new features.

Submitting a new issue or feature request

Do your best to follow these guidelines when submitting an issue or a feature request. It will make it easier for us to come back to you quickly and with good feedback.

Did you find a bug?

The huggingface_hub library is robust and reliable thanks to the users who notify us of the problems they encounter. So thank you for reporting an issue.

First, we would really appreciate it if you could make sure the bug was not already reported (use the search bar on Github under Issues).

Did not find it? :( So we can act quickly on it, please follow these steps:

• A short, self-contained, code snippet that allows us to reproduce the bug in less than 30s;
• Provide the full traceback if an exception is raised by copying the text from your terminal in the issue description.
• Include information about your local setup. You can dump this information by running huggingface-cli env in your terminal;

Do you want a new feature?

A good feature request addresses the following points:

1. Motivation first:

• Is it related to a problem/frustration with the library? If so, please explain why and provide a code snippet that demonstrates the problem best.
• Is it related to something you would need for a project? We'd love to hear about it!
• Is it something you worked on and think could benefit the community? Awesome! Tell us what problem it solved for you.

2. Write a full paragraph describing the feature;
3. Provide a code snippet that demonstrates its future use;
4. In case this is related to a paper, please attach a link;
5. Attach any additional information (drawings, screenshots, etc.) you think may help.

If your issue is well written we're already 80% of the way there by the time you post it!

Submitting a pull request (PR)

Before writing code, we strongly advise you to search through the existing PRs or issues to make sure that nobody is already working on the same thing. If you are unsure, it is always a good idea to open an issue to get some feedback.

You will need basic git proficiency to be able to contribute to huggingface_hub. git is not the easiest tool to use but it has the greatest manual. Type git --help in a shell and enjoy. If you prefer books, Pro Git is a very good reference.

Follow these steps to start contributing:

1. Fork the repository by clicking on the 'Fork' button on the repository's page. This creates a copy of the code under your GitHub user account.

2. Clone your fork to your local disk, and add the base repository as a remote. The following command assumes you have your public SSH key uploaded to GitHub. See the following guide for more information.

   $ git clone git@github.com:<your Github handle>/huggingface_hub.git
   $ cd huggingface_hub
   $ git remote add upstream https://github.com/huggingface/huggingface_hub.git

3. Create a new branch to hold your development changes, and do this for every new PR you work on.

   Start by synchronizing your main branch with the upstream/main branch (ore details in the GitHub Docs):

   $ git checkout main
   $ git fetch upstream
   $ git merge upstream/main

   Once your main branch is synchronized, create a new branch from it:

   $ git checkout -b a-descriptive-name-for-my-changes

   Do not work on the main branch.

4. Set up a development environment by running the following command in a virtual environment or a conda environment you've created for working on this library:

   $ pip uninstall huggingface_hub # make sure huggingface_hub is not already installed
   $ pip install -e ".[dev]" # install in editable (-e) mode

5. Develop the features on your branch

6. Test your implementation!

   To make a good Pull Request you must test the features you have added. To do so, we use the unittest framework and run them using pytest:

   $ pytest tests -k <TEST_NAME>
   # or
   $ pytest tests/<TEST_FILE>.py

7. Format your code.

   hugginface_hub relies on ruff to format its source code consistently. You can apply automatic style corrections and code verifications with the following command:

   $ make style

   This command will update your code to comply with the standards of the huggingface_hub repository. A few custom scripts are also run to ensure consistency. Once automatic style corrections have been applied, you must test that it passes the quality checks:

   $ make quality

   Compared to make style, make quality will never update your code. In addition to the previous code formatter, it also runs mypy to check for static typing issues. All those tests will also run in the CI once you open your PR but it is recommended to run them locally in order to iterate faster.

   For the commands leveraging the make utility, we recommend using the WSL system when running on Windows. More information here.

8. (optional) Alternatively, you can install pre-commit hooks so that these styles are applied and checked on files that you have touched in each commit:

   pip install pre-commit
   pre-commit install

   You only need to do the above once in your repository's environment. If for any reason you would like to disable pre-commit hooks on a commit, you can pass -n to your git commit command to temporarily disable pre-commit hooks.

   To permanently disable hooks, you can run the following command:

   pre-commit uninstall

9. Once you're happy with your changes, add changed files using git add and make a commit with git commit to record your changes locally:

   $ git add modified_file.py
   $ git commit

   Please write good commit messages.

   It is a good idea to sync your copy of the code with the original repository regularly. The following document covers it in length: github documentation

   And here's how you can do it quickly from your git commandline:

   $ git fetch upstream
   $ git rebase upstream/main

   Push the changes to your account using:

   $ git push -u origin a-descriptive-name-for-my-changes

10. Once you are satisfied (and the checklist below is happy too), go to the webpage of your fork on GitHub. Click on 'Pull request' to send your changes to the project maintainers for review.

11. It's ok if maintainers ask you for changes. It happens all the time to core contributors too! So everyone can see the changes in the Pull request, work in your local branch and push the changes to your fork. They will automatically appear in the pull request.

12. Once your changes have been approved, one of the project maintainers will merge your pull request for you. Good job!

Checklist

1. The title of your pull request should be a summary of its contribution;
2. If your pull request addresses an issue, please mention the issue number in the pull request description to make sure they are linked (and people consulting the issue know you are working on it);
3. To indicate a work in progress please prefix the title with [WIP], or mark the PR as a draft PR. These are useful to avoid duplicated work, and to differentiate it from PRs ready to be merged;
4. Make sure existing tests pass;
5. Add high-coverage tests. No quality testing = no merge.
6. Due to the rapidly growing repository, it is important to make sure that no files that would significantly weigh down the repository are added. This includes images, videos and other non-text files. We prefer to leverage a hf.co hosted dataset like the ones hosted on hf-internal-testing in which to place these files and reference them by URL. We recommend putting them in the following dataset: huggingface/documentation-images. If an external contribution, feel free to add the images to your PR and ask a Hugging Face member to migrate your images to this dataset.

Tests

An extensive test suite is included to test the library behavior and several examples. Library tests can be found in the tests folder.

We use pytest in order to run the tests for the library. From the root of the repository they can be run with the following:

$ python -m pytest ./tests

You can specify a smaller set of tests in order to test only the feature you're working on.

For example, the following will only run the tests in the test_repository.py file:

$ python -m pytest ./tests/test_repository.py

And the following will only run the tests that include tag in their name:

$ python -m pytest ./tests -k tag

A corner case: testing Spaces

Fully testing Spaces is not possible on staging. We need to use the production environment for it (e.g huggingface.co). To do so, a personal User Access Token has to be set as HUGGINGFACE_PRODUCTION_USER_TOKEN environment variable, specifically for these tests. This value is configured in the Github CI but you need to set it on your machine to run the tests locally. The token requires write permission and a credit card must be set on your account.

Note that if the token is not find, the related tests are skipped.