HF GGUF Downloader

Unofficial project, not affiliated with Hugging Face.

A minimal Windows desktop application for downloading complete GGUF models from Hugging Face. Paste a link to any GGUF shard, choose a destination directory, and select START. For a filename such as model-00001-of-00003.gguf, the application automatically discovers and downloads all three parts.

Features

• accepts a Hugging Face resolve URL for any .gguf shard,
• automatically expands sharded filenames and verifies every expected part,
• shows per-file and total byte progress,
• supports cancellation while preserving resumable partial downloads,
• reuses the Hugging Face cache and credentials,
• works with public, private, and gated repositories,
• builds as a single Windows EXE with PyInstaller.

How downloads work

The current successor to huggingface-cli is the hf command. Both are interfaces to the official huggingface_hub Python package. This application calls the same download backend directly because redirected CLI output does not provide a stable machine-readable progress stream.

Direct integration lets the GUI report byte-level progress, cancel an active worker process, and keep the partial cache needed to resume a transfer. It also allows the runtime to be packaged without a separate CLI installation.

See the official Hugging Face CLI documentation for authentication details.

Run from source

Requirements:

• Windows,
• Python 3.11, 3.12, or 3.13,
• uv.

uv sync --group dev
uv run hf-gguf-downloader

Public repositories do not require authentication. For private or gated repositories, authenticate with the standard CLI first, or provide an HF_TOKEN environment variable:

uv run hf auth login

Destination layout

For a base directory of E:\LLMs and the repository unsloth/Model-GGUF, downloaded files are stored under:

E:\LLMs\unsloth\Model-GGUF\<repository subdirectory>\file.gguf

The hidden .cache\huggingface directory inside the repository folder contains metadata used to skip completed files and resume interrupted transfers. Do not remove it during a download.

Tests and checks

uv run pytest
uv run ruff check .
uv run ruff format --check src tests scripts

Build the Windows EXE

.\build.ps1

The build output is written to dist\HF-GGUF-Downloader.exe. The script only builds locally; it does not publish anything.

When distributing the binary, include all three files from dist:

• HF-GGUF-Downloader.exe,
• LICENSE.txt,
• THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.txt.

The executable is not digitally signed.

License

The current implementation is available under the MIT License. Notices and license texts for components bundled into the EXE are listed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.txt. Legacy versions in this repository remain subject to the license included with those versions.

This application does not grant a license to downloaded models. Each model remains subject to the terms chosen by the author or owner of its Hugging Face repository.