pulsys-io/pulsys

Pulsys is a local caching proxy that sits between your machines and the Hugging Face Hub, the site where many AI models are hosted. Instead of every machine downloading the same model file from the internet each time, you point your Hugging Face tools at Pulsys, and the first download fills a local disk cache. Every download after that is served straight from that local cache with no further trips out to the internet. You use it by setting an environment variable called HF_ENDPOINT to point at Pulsys instead of the real Hugging Face servers. From there, the tools people already use to work with Hugging Face, such as the huggingface_hub library, transformers, datasets, the hf command line tool, and hf_transfer, keep working exactly as before, they simply talk to Pulsys instead of the internet. On the first run this fills the cache, and on later runs the same model comes back instantly from disk. Under the hood, Pulsys uses fast file transfer techniques, io_uring on Linux and sendfile on macOS, to serve cached files quickly once they are warm. The README reports very high throughput numbers from its own benchmarks on a large cloud server, though your own results will depend on your hardware and network. To try it locally, you clone the repository, set a Hugging Face token as an environment variable, and start it with Docker Compose. This gives you an admin console where you create an API key, which you then use as your Hugging Face token when talking to the proxy. For real deployments, Pulsys ships a Helm chart for running on Kubernetes, backed by an external PostgreSQL database, with support for single sign on and documented security hardening steps. Running multiple linked instances together is planned but not yet available. Pulsys is written in Go and released under the Apache License 2.0, a permissive license that allows commercial use as long as you keep the required notices. The project accepts outside contributions following a documented process and requires passing its automated tests before changes are merged.