hfd

Privately Headless HuggingFace Daemon

hfd is a Go daemon that serves Hugging Face Hub protocols from your own infrastructure. Point HF_ENDPOINT at it or add it as a Git remote, and the Hub API, Git, Git LFS, and Xet clients work against repositories you host for supported operations.

Why Headless

Deployment and storage stay under your control. Repositories are operator-managed bare Git repositories, and large files are chunk-deduplicated Xet content, kept in a local data directory or in S3-compatible object storage, optionally with pull-through or push mirroring of another hub.

There is no web UI, and no external database service is required. Identity comes from HTTP basic auth, bearer or signed tokens, and SSH keys; authorization goes through a pluggable pre-open hook and the catalog callbacks, push handling through receive hooks.

Protocols and Clients

Protocol	Clients
Hugging Face Hub API	hf CLI, huggingface_hub
Git smart HTTP	git
Git over SSH	git
Git LFS	git-lfs
Xet CAS	git-xet, hf_xet

Compatibility

• hfd implements a subset of the Hub API. Coverage is tracked per endpoint in hf-api-status.md against the Hugging Face Hub OpenAPI (interactive viewer).
• test/e2e exercises git, git-lfs, hf, huggingface_hub, and hf_xet against local and S3 backends.
• Filesystem-backed repositories use the system git binary when one is available; otherwise, and for S3, hfd falls back to go-git.
• Coverage evolves with upstream API and client changes.

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE for the full license text.