Natively Connect to Hugging Face Data in PHP

Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
The CData ODBC driver for Hugging Face enables you to create PHP applications with connectivity to Hugging Face data. Leverage the native support for ODBC in PHP.

Drop the CData ODBC Driver for Hugging Face into your LAMP or WAMP stack to build Hugging Face-connected Web applications. This article shows how to use PHP's ODBC built-in functions to connect to Hugging Face data, execute queries, and output the results.

Configure a DSN

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

HuggingFace Hub uses token-based authentication to enable access to its API. The API provides access to machine learning models, datasets, spaces, papers, and other resources on the HuggingFace Hub platform.

Using API Key Authentication

To authenticate to HuggingFace Hub, you will need to provide an API Key (Access Token). To obtain your access token:

  1. Log in to your HuggingFace account at https://huggingface.co
  2. Navigate to Settings > Access Tokens
  3. Click "New token" to create a new access token
  4. Select the appropriate permissions (read or write)
  5. Copy the token value

After obtaining your access token, set the following connection properties:

  • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
  • APIKey: Set this to your HuggingFace access token.

Example connection string

Profile=C:\profiles\HuggingFace.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=hf_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx';

Establish a Connection

Open the connection to Hugging Face by calling the odbc_connect or odbc_pconnect methods. To close connections, use odbc_close or odbc_close_all.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC API Source","user","password");

Connections opened with odbc_connect are closed when the script ends. Connections opened with the odbc_pconnect method are still open after the script ends. This enables other scripts to share that connection when they connect with the same credentials. By sharing connections among your scripts, you can save system resources, and queries execute faster.

$conn = odbc_pconnect("CData ODBC API Source","user","password");
...
odbc_close($conn); //persistent connection must be closed explicitly

Create Prepared Statements

Create prepared statements and parameterized queries with the odbc_prepare function.

$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Collections WHERE  = ?");

Execute Queries

Execute prepared statements with odbc_execute.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC API Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Collections WHERE  = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array(''));
  

Execute nonparameterized queries with odbc_exec.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC API Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT ,  FROM Collections WHERE  = ''");
  

Process Results

Access a row in the result set as an array with the odbc_fetch_array function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Hugging Face data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT ,  FROM Collections WHERE  = ''");
while($row = odbc_fetch_array($query)){
 echo $row[""] . "\n";
}

Display the result set in an HTML table with the odbc_result_all function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Hugging Face data Source","user","password");
$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Collections WHERE  = ?");
$success = odbc_execute($query, array(''));
if($success)
  odbc_result_all($query);

More Example Queries

You will find complete information on the driver's supported SQL in the help documentation. The code examples above are Hugging Face-specific adaptations of the PHP community documentation for all ODBC functions.

Ready to get started?

Connect to live data from Hugging Face with the API Driver

Connect to Hugging Face