Hugging Face Jobs

Cloud compute on HF infra. Pay-per-second. Pro/Team/Enterprise plan required.

Three surfaces — same model under each:

Surface	Use when
hf jobs ... CLI	One-off submissions, quick scripts, shell pipelines, inspecting state
huggingface_hub Python (run_job, run_uv_job, Volume, inspect_job, fetch_job_logs, create_scheduled_job)	Programmatic submission, parallel fan-out, scripted orchestration
hf_jobs(...) MCP tool	Submitting via Claude in this session — script accepts inline Python directly, $HF_TOKEN is auto-substituted in secrets

The plugin skill huggingface-skills:hugging-face-jobs has the long-form reference (token semantics across all three surfaces, sample patterns like vLLM batch generation, troubleshooting matrix). This project skill is the project-fit layer plus a compact CLI/Python cheat sheet — open it first, escalate to the plugin skill for general patterns.

Reference index

File	Open when working on
references/cli-and-python.md	CLI and Python cheat sheet — hf jobs run, hf jobs uv run, ps/logs/inspect/stats/cancel, scheduled jobs, hardware flavors + costs, --timeout / --namespace / --label / -e / -s / --env-file / --secrets-file, volume mount syntax, Volume class, built-in env vars (JOB_ID, ACCELERATOR, CPU_CORES, MEMORY), webhook triggers

Always-true essentials

• UV is the default surface. hf jobs uv run (or hf_jobs("uv", ...)) takes a script (local path via CLI; inline string or URL via MCP — local paths fail in MCP because the container can't see them) with PEP 723 inline deps. Plain Docker (hf jobs run <image> <cmd>) is the escape hatch for non-Python or pre-built images (vLLM, DuckDB, pytorch/pytorch).
• Default UV image: ghcr.io/astral-sh/uv:python3.12-bookworm. Override with --image for ML-heavy frameworks.
• Default timeout is 30 min. Always pass --timeout for anything training-shaped. Format: 30m, 1.5h, 1d, or seconds.
• Default flavor is cpu-basic. Pass --flavor for GPU/TPU. List + prices: hf jobs hardware.
• Environment is ephemeral. Anything not pushed to a Hub repo, written to a mounted bucket, or POSTed elsewhere dies with the container. For training, mount a bucket as the output dir.
• Token forwarding: CLI --secrets HF_TOKEN (reads local env / ~/.cache/huggingface/token); MCP secrets={"HF_TOKEN": "$HF_TOKEN"} (auto-replaced); Python API secrets={"HF_TOKEN": get_token()} (the literal "$HF_TOKEN" will 401).
• Volume mounts: -v hf://[TYPE/]SOURCE:/MOUNT_PATH[:ro]. Models/datasets read-only always; buckets read-write by default. Requires huggingface_hub >= 1.8.0 for the Python Volume class.
• Namespace: jobs land in your user namespace by default. --namespace <org> for organization billing/visibility.
• Async by default. Submission returns a JobInfo with id + url. Don't poll in a tight loop — inspect_job or hf jobs ps --filter status=running when the user asks.
• Auth check: hf auth whoami (or hf_whoami()). Plan gate: Jobs are paid-tier only, so 403 on submission usually means a free account, not bad code.

Auth

hf auth login once locally; the same token gets forwarded to jobs via --secrets HF_TOKEN. .env at repo root already holds the token used by the pre-push HF Space hooks — same token works for Jobs.

Maintenance

References are self-contained — no live URLs read at runtime. When the HF docs shift (new flavor, CLI flag rename), refresh the file rather than adding an external link. Keep each reference file under ~300 lines; split when concerns mix.