Where does hugging face's transformers save models?

Question

Running the below code downloads a model - does anyone know what folder it downloads it to?

!pip install -q transformers
from transformers import pipeline
model = pipeline('fill-mask')

Answer 1

Update 2021-03-11: The cache location has now changed, and is located in ~/.cache/huggingface/transformers, as it is also detailed in the answer by @victorx.

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This post should shed some light on it (plus some investigation of my own, since it is already a bit older).

As mentioned, the default location in a Linux system is ~/.cache/torch/transformers/ (I'm using transformers v 2.7, currently, but it is unlikely to change anytime soon.). The cryptic folder names in this directory seemingly correspond to the Amazon S3 hashes.

Also note that the pipeline tasks are just a "rerouting" to other models. To know which one you are currently loading, see here. For your specific model, pipeline(fill-mask) actually utilizes a distillroberta-base model.

Answer 2

As of Transformers version 4.3, the cache location has been changed.

The exact place is defined in this code section ​https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/master/src/transformers/file_utils.py#L181-L187

On Linux, it is at ~/.cache/huggingface/transformers.

The file names there are basically SHA hashes of the original URLs from which the files are downloaded. The corresponding json files can help you figure out what are the original file names.

Answer 3

On windows 10, replace ~ with C:\Users\username or in cmd do cd /d "%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%".

So full path will be: C:\Users\username\.cache\huggingface\transformers

Answer 4

As of transformers 4.22, the path appears to be (tested on CentOS):

~/.cache/huggingface/hub/