Hugging Face CLI for AI Agents

The hf CLI is a great way to connect your agents to the Hugging Face Hub and ecosystem. Search models, manage datasets and buckets, launch Spaces, and run jobs from any coding agent.

This is a quick guide on agents that use the CLI. For more detailed information, see the CLI Reference itself.

Install the CLI

Make sure the hf CLI is installed and up to date. See the CLI installation guide for setup instructions.

The recommended standalone installer also installs the CLI Skill globally, including the Claude Code location, so agents pick it up with no extra step. Pass --exclude-skill (or -ExcludeSkill on Windows) to skip it.

Add the CLI Skill

Skills give your agent the context it needs to use tools effectively. The standalone installer adds the CLI Skill for you — install it by hand if you used pip or Homebrew, skipped it, or want it in a single project. Learn more about Skills at agentskills.io.

# install globally (available in all projects, works with Codex, Cursor, OpenCode,
# and any agent that loads skills from ~/.agents/skills)
hf skills add --global

# for Claude Code use the --claude flag
hf skills add --claude --global

# or install for the current project only (works with Codex, Cursor, OpenCode,
# and any agent that loads skills from .agents/skills)
hf skills add

# for Claude Code, use the --claude flag
hf skills add --claude

The Skill is generated from your locally installed CLI version, so it goes stale when you upgrade. hf update refreshes a globally installed Skill — never re-adding one you removed — and hf skills update -g refreshes it on its own. hf reminds you once a day if the Skill is missing or outdated; silence that with HF_HUB_DISABLE_UPDATE_CHECK=1.

Alternatively, you can install via the Claude Code plugin system:

claude
/plugin marketplace add huggingface/skills
/plugin install hf-cli@huggingface/skills

Resources

• CLI Reference - Complete command documentation
• Token Settings - Manage your tokens
• Jobs Documentation - Compute jobs guide