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 p