About hf-mirror.eu

hf-mirror.eu is a community-operated, read-through cache of huggingface.co. It exists to:

• reduce the egress load on the upstream CDN for clients in Europe;
• provide a stable fallback for academic, research and CI workloads;
• serve large model artefacts at line-rate from local peering points.

The project is operated by a registered non-profit association (hf-mirror e.V.) under German law. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Hugging Face Inc. Mirrored content is redistributed strictly under its upstream license; we do not relicense, modify, or repackage artefacts.

Documentation

Endpoint

The mirror is a drop-in replacement for the upstream Hub API:

# equivalent to https://huggingface.co/...
https://hf-mirror.eu/{org}/{model}
https://hf-mirror.eu/api/models
https://hf-mirror.eu/api/datasets

Client configuration

# env
export HF_ENDPOINT=https://hf-mirror.eu

# python
from huggingface_hub import snapshot_download
snapshot_download(
    repo_id="BAAI/bge-m3",
    endpoint="https://hf-mirror.eu",
)

# transformers (uses HF_ENDPOINT automatically)
from transformers import AutoModel
m = AutoModel.from_pretrained("sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2")

Headers & behaviour

• Range and partial-content responses are honoured for files > 16 MB.
• The mirror sets X-Cache: HIT|MISS|REVALIDATED on every response.
• Cold misses incur an upstream fetch and may take 5–60 s for the first byte.
• HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 (QUIC) are supported on every edge node.
• All resolver redirects target HTTPS endpoints under cdn-lfs.huggingface.co or huggingface.co.

Rate limits

Anonymous: 30 req/s per IPv4 /32, 256 parallel connections per /48 IPv6. Higher quotas are available for academic and CI users — contact noc with a description of the workload.

rsync access

Each peer exposes an anonymous, read-only rsync module. Useful for full-repo snapshots and for downstream re-mirroring.

rsync rsync://fra1.hf-mirror.eu/
# models   public model repositories (read-only)
# datasets public dataset repositories (read-only)
# indexes  metadata snapshots (Parquet)

Peer mirrors

The mirror network consists of four geographically separated nodes, each running an identical software stack (nginx + tus + custom origin shim, plus rsyncd). Routing is anycast for HTTP and DNS-based for rsync.

Governance

hf-mirror e.V. is governed by an elected three-person board (chair, treasurer, secretary). Operational decisions are made by the on-call rotation and discussed in the open mailing list. Annual reports and audited financials are published on the public Git.

We do not accept paid placement or advertising. Sponsorships listed on the homepage cover infrastructure costs only and confer no editorial influence.

Terms of use

1. Use of this mirror is subject to the upstream Hugging Face Terms of Service. Where the two conflict, the upstream terms govern.
2. You must comply with the license attached to each repository. The mirror is a transport layer and does not relax licensing constraints.
3. Automated bulk downloads exceeding 1 TB / 24 h must use rsync, not the HTTP resolver.
4. The service is provided as-is, with no warranty of availability, integrity or fitness for any purpose.
5. Abuse — including circumventing per-repo gating, scraping private endpoints, or DDoS-like patterns — will result in network-level blocking.

Privacy

We log request method, anonymised IP (last octet zeroed for IPv4, last 80 bits zeroed for IPv6), user-agent, request path, response code and bytes served. Logs are kept for 14 days for abuse mitigation and are then aggregated into anonymous traffic statistics. We do not set cookies, do not run third-party trackers and do not share logs with any third party absent a binding legal order.

Contact

Operations / abuse

noc [at] hf-mirror.eu

PGP key

0xC4A2 9F1D 7E40 BB18 · download

Mailing list

announce@lists.hf-mirror.eu

IRC

#hf-mirror on irc.libera.chat

Postal

hf-mirror e.V. · c/o Wikimedia DE · Tempelhofer Ufer 23/24 · 10963 Berlin · Germany