๐ ๐ Oxen Python Interface
June 12, 2026 ยท View on GitHub
The Oxen python interface makes it easy to integrate Oxen datasets directly into machine learning dataloaders or other data pipelines.
Repositories
There are two types of repositories one can interact with, a Repo and a RemoteRepo.
Local Repo
To fully clone all the data to your local machine, you can use the Repo class.
import oxen
repo = oxen.Repo("path/to/repository")
repo.clone("https://hub.oxen.ai/ox/CatDogBBox")
If there is a specific version of your data you want to access, you can specify the branch when cloning.
repo.clone("https://hub.oxen.ai/ox/CatDogBBox", branch="my-pets")
Once you have a repository locally, you can perform the same operations you might via the command line, through the python api.
For example, you can checkout a branch, add a file, commit, and push the data to the same remote you cloned it from.
import oxen
repo = oxen.Repo("path/to/repository")
repo.clone("https://hub.oxen.ai/ox/CatDogBBox")
repo.checkout()
Remote Repo
If you don't want to download the data locally, you can use the RemoteRepo class to interact with a remote repository on OxenHub.
import oxen
repo = oxen.RemoteRepo("https://hub.oxen.ai/ox/CatDogBBox")
To stage and commit files to a specific version of the data, you can checkout an existing branch or create a new one.
repo.create_branch("dev")
repo.checkout("dev")
You can then stage files to the remote repository by specifying the file path and destination directory.
repo.add("new-cat.png", "images") # Stage to images/new-cat.png on remote
repo.commit("Adding another training image")
Note that no "push" command is required here, since the above code creates a commit directly on the remote branch.
Build ๐จ
See the prerequisites section of the main readme before developing.
To get and build dependencies, as well as the oxen-python code, run:
uv sync --verbose
To build the PyO3 oxen wrappers only, use maturin and --no-sync:
uv run --no-sync maturin develop
Test
Run pytest:
uv run --verbose pytest -s tests/
If you have already installed all dependencies, and you're not making any changes to
liboxen, then you may use --no-sync:
uv run --no-sync pytest -s tests/
Format and lint code with:
uvx ruff check .
uvx ruff format .
Logging
Oxen uses structured logging. It outputs to STDERR by default but can be configured with rotating log files. See Logging for details.
By default, the oxen-python does not perform any logging. Set RUST_LOG to change.