How to Download and Upload Large Models with the Hugging Face CLI

Managing large model files on Hugging Face can feel cumbersome — especially when dealing with multigigabyte embeddings or generative models. Fortunately, the Hugging Face CLI provides a straightforward workflow for downloading public models and re-uploading them to your own repositories, including large ones that support resumable uploads.

In this post, we’ll walk through exactly how you can:

• Download a large model (like Qwen3-Embedding-8B) directly from Hugging Face.
• Upload it to your own repo (in this case, OpenSite/forge).
• Handle connection drops, resumable uploads, and commit messages — all from your terminal.

This is a simple, CLI-first guide that gets you productive fast with model management, especially if you’re maintaining open-access or shared AI model repositories.

Step 1 — Download the model

Assuming you have the hf cli installed on your system

The example below uses the following examples:

• Downloading the Qwen3-Embedding-8B model from the Qwen organization's hugging face profile
• Uploading the model to our public, open source model repo on hugging face
• So just swap out the names for the model you want to download and the repo you want to upload to

hf download Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B --local-dir ./Qwen3-Embedding-8B

This downloads all model files into a Qwen3-Embedding-8B/ subdirectory.

Step 2 — Upload to OpenSite/forge

Since this is an 8B model (likely 15-30GB), use the large-folder uploader for resumable uploads:

hf upload-large-folder OpenSite/forge ./Qwen3-Embedding-8B

Or if you prefer the standard uploader (non-resumable):

hf upload OpenSite/forge ./Qwen3-Embedding-8B

Notes

• The download will take a while — Qwen3-Embedding-8B is ~15GB in bf16 format
• upload-large-folder is strongly recommended here since it supports resuming if the connection drops mid-upload
• Both commands will use your currently logged-in HF token automatically
• If you want to add a commit message to the upload: --commit-message "Add Qwen3-Embedding-8B"

You can verify your login first with:

hf auth whoami

That’s it — two commands and you’re done. With the hf CLI, managing massive model files no longer needs to be painful. Whether you’re curating open-access models like we do at OpenSite AI, or just organizing internal repositories, this workflow keeps things simple, repeatable, and automatable.

👉 Check out our OpenSite/forge Hugging Face repo for open-source models and embeddings, or visit opensite.ai/developers to explore our latest AI infrastructure tools.