Companion CLIs

Four CLIs commonly needed alongside Runpod: HuggingFace (hf), GitHub (gh), Docker (docker), and AWS (aws). Each requires credentials before use.

Windows: Install WSL2 First

If you are on Windows, install WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux) before proceeding. WSL2 gives you a native Linux environment on Windows, which all these CLIs are designed for. Run in PowerShell as Administrator, then restart:

wsl --install

This installs WSL2 with Ubuntu by default. After restarting, open the Ubuntu app to complete setup (create a Linux username and password). From that point on, follow the Linux instructions throughout this skill.

HuggingFace CLI

The HuggingFace CLI (hf) is used to download models from the Hub to your local machine so they are cached and available when you build and run the Docker container. For example, to deploy meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B to a Runpod serverless endpoint: download the model locally first, build a Docker image that includes or mounts it, validate the container locally, then push the image to Docker Hub for Runpod to pull.

Install