Quickstart

Examples use BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5, a small embedding model (about 133 MB for the weights). Swap in any model id from the catalog. No account and no token are needed.

Pick a model#

Open a model page and copy its id, for example BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5. The manifest is at /manifests/<org>/<repo>.json.

Way 1, fw.py#

fw.py is one Python file with no dependencies. It checks the manifest signature, downloads each file from the sources in order with resume, and checks size and sha256.

python3 fw.py get https://freeweights.allternit.com/manifests/BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5.json --dir bge-small --pubkey spec/keys/freeweights-v0.pub

It needs the minisign program to check the signature (brew install minisign on macOS). Without it, fw.py stops. You can pass --no-verify-sig, but then the manifest is not authenticated. Get fw.py and the public key file from the repository.

Way 2, Hugging Face tools#

Set one variable and use the tools you already have.

export HF_ENDPOINT=https://freeweights.allternit.com
export HF_HUB_DISABLE_IMPLICIT_TOKEN=1
hf download BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5 --local-dir bge-small

Do not send a Hugging Face token. A request that carries one is refused with 401. See the HF_ENDPOINT page for what works.

Way 3, plain links#

Every file has a URL:

curl -L -O https://freeweights.allternit.com/BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5/resolve/main/config.json

The server answers with a redirect to the best live source, so use -L. For large files aria2c -x4 -s4 <url> works, because range requests pass through the redirect.

Check what you got#

The Hugging Face tools and plain links do not check hashes for you. Check them against the manifest:

python3 fw.py verify bge-small manifests/BAAI__bge-small-en-v1.5.json --pubkey spec/keys/freeweights-v0.pub

Look for VERDICT: PASS. The Verify page explains each step and how to check by hand.