What huggingface_hub 2.0 changes, and why transformers keeps you on 1.x for now

Hugging Face released version 2.0 of huggingface_hub on September 24th. It's the Python library that downloads and publishes models and datasets on the Hub, and transformers, datasets and diffusers all depend on it. It's a major version, so some code written for 1.x will stop working.

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huggingface/huggingface_hub · GitHub release v2.0.0 · PyPI

Released September 24, 2026 Major version Breaks some 1.x code

Two things changed. The HTTP library it uses to talk to the Hub moves from httpx to its successor, httpx2. And everything Hugging Face marked as deprecated during the 1.x series is gone. The most visible one is the old huggingface-cli command. The command line is just hf now.

The reason is upstream. The httpx project is no longer actively maintained. Swapping the library underneath breaks code that depends on it, so Hugging Face shipped the change as a major version.

So who has to change anything? Mostly people who write code against huggingface_hub itself, especially code that handles its network errors or sets up its own HTTP client. Scripts that still use a deprecated feature, including the old command line, need updating too. And certificates now come from your operating system's trust store by default. A custom certificate bundle set the usual way still works.

If you mostly use Hugging Face through its other libraries, this doesn't reach you yet. As of September 28th, the newest releases of transformers, datasets, diffusers and sentence transformers all require huggingface_hub below 2.0, so installing them keeps you on 1.x. Hugging Face's plan is for those libraries to accept both versions. transformers has merged that change but hasn't released it yet, and it's still under review for datasets and diffusers.

For the exact changes, go to Hugging Face's own migration guide. It's in the huggingface_hub docs, under Migrating to v2.0, and it lists every removed feature with its replacement. The full release notes are on GitHub. That's huggingface_hub 2.0: a new HTTP library, the deprecated features gone, and most of the ecosystem on 1.x for now.