Hugging Face Jobs

Set up Hugging Face Jobs for hi compute - sign-in, credits and who pays, and registering your SSH key on the Hub so shells and tunnels work.

hi uses the Hugging Face Jobs REST API directly. Jobs bill US dollars per minute, run any container image, and can expose HTTPS endpoints.

Set it up

1. Sign in

hi login hf

This runs hf auth login from the hf CLI, which hi install installs, and then shows who you are. hi reads the resulting token the same way the hf CLI does: $HF_TOKEN, then $HF_TOKEN_PATH, then ~/.cache/huggingface/token. It never prints or stores it.

If you only installed hi itself, install the hf CLI first:

curl -LsSf https://hf.co/cli/install.sh | bash

2. Make sure someone can pay

Jobs need pre-paid credits on the account that pays: your own account or an organization you belong to. hi bills your own account if it can pay, otherwise your only organization that can:

hi compute billing

Hugging Face:
ACCOUNT    TYPE  CAN PAY  PLAN  BILLED
quantbert  user  no
hifinab    org   yes      team  <- hi bills this

If no account can pay, add credits at huggingface.co/settings/billing. Costs, limits, and billing explains how to choose a different account.

3. Add your SSH key to the Hub

hi compute ssh and tunnel connect through the Jobs SSH gateway, which only accepts keys registered on your Hugging Face account. Runs, logs, and serve use the API and work without this.

1. Print your public key, creating one first if needed:

   ls ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub || ssh-keygen -t ed25519
   cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub
   

2. Open huggingface.co/settings/keys and choose Add SSH Key.
3. Paste the whole line, which starts with ssh-ed25519, give it a name such as your laptop’s, and save.
4. Check it with a cheap machine:

   hi compute up --on hf --name keytest --max 10m
   hi compute ssh keytest -- echo it works
   hi compute stop keytest
   

Without a registered key, ssh fails with Permission denied (publickey) and hi points you back here.

Hardware

hi compute hardware --on hf lists every flavor with its current price. Some common ones:

Multi-GPU flavors such as a100x4 and h200x8 are listed too.

What runs where

Images must be public on Docker Hub or another registry the job can pull from.

Features only Hugging Face has

• Detached runs: run --detach, then logs --follow and wait. See Run a job to completion.
• Secrets: --secret NAME sends a value from your shell encrypted.
• HTTPS endpoints: serve returns a URL such as https://<job>--8000.hf.jobs/v1 that works from anywhere with a Hugging Face token and answers 401 without one.
• Limits enforced by Hugging Face: --max becomes the job’s timeout, so a job stops even when your laptop is off.

Troubleshooting