list

List project contents, including files, models, and directories tracked by DVC and by Git.

Useful to find data to dvc get, dvc import, or for dvc.api functions.

Synopsis

usage: dvc list [-h] [-q | -v] [-R] [--dvc-only]
                [--show-json] [--rev [<commit>]]
                url [path]

positional arguments:
  url            Location of DVC or Git repository to list from
  path           Path to a file or directory within the repository

Description

Produces a view of a DVC repository (usually online), listing data files and directories tracked by DVC alongside the remaining Git repo contents. This is useful because when you browse a hosted repository (e.g. on GitHub or with git ls-remote), you only see the dvc.yaml and .dvc files with your code (files tracked by Git).

This command's output is equivalent to cloning the repo and pulling the data (except that nothing is downloaded), like this:

$ git clone <url> example
$ cd example
$ dvc pull
$ ls <path>

The url argument specifies the address of the DVC or Git repository containing the data source. Both HTTP and SSH protocols are supported (e.g. [user@]server:project.git). url can also be a local file system path (including the current project e.g. .).

The optional path argument is used to specify a directory to list within the Git repo at url (including paths inside tracked directories). It's similar to providing a path to list to commands such as ls or aws s3 ls.

Only the root directory is listed by default, but the -R option can be used to list files recursively.

Please note that dvc list doesn't check whether the listed data (tracked by DVC) actually exists in remote storage, so it's not guaranteed whether it can be accessed with dvc get, dvc import, or dvc.api.

Options

-R, --recursive - recursively prints contents of all subdirectories.
--dvc-only - show only DVC-tracked files and directories (outputs).
--rev <commit> - commit hash, branch or tag name, etc. (any Git revision) of the repository to list content for. The latest commit in master (tip of the default branch) is used by default when this option is not specified.
--show-json - prints the command's output in easily parsable JSON format, instead of a human-readable table.
-h, --help - prints the usage/help message, and exit.
-q, --quiet - do not write anything to standard output. Exit with 0 if no problems arise, otherwise 1.
-v, --verbose - displays detailed tracing information. when this option is not specified.

Example: Find files to download from a repository

We can use this command for getting information about a repository before using other commands like dvc get or dvc import to reuse any file or directory found in it. This includes files (or directories) tracked by DVC or by Git:

$ dvc list https://github.com/iterative/example-get-started
.dvcignore
.gitignore
README.md
data
dvc.lock
dvc.yaml
model.pkl
params.yaml
prc.json
scores.json
src

If you open the example-get-started project's page, you will see a similar list but the model.pkl file. It's tracked by DVC and not visible to Git. It's exported in the dvc.yaml file as an output of the train stage (in the outs field).

We can now, for example, download the model file with:

$ dvc get https://github.com/iterative/example-get-started model.pkl

Example: List all files and directories in a data registry

Let's imagine a DVC repo used as a data registry, structured with different datasets in separate directories. We can do this recursively, using -R option:

$ dvc list -R https://github.com/iterative/dataset-registry
.gitignore
README.md
get-started/.gitignore
get-started/data.xml
get-started/data.xml.dvc
images/.gitignore
images/dvc-logo-outlines.png
images/dvc-logo-outlines.png.dvc
images/owl_sticker.png
...

Example: Create an archive of your DVC project

Just like you can use git archive to make a quick bundle (ZIP) file of the current code, dvc list can be easily complemented with simple archive tools to bundle the current data files in the project.

For example, here's a TAR archive of the entire workspace (Linux/GNU):

$ dvc list . -R | tar -cvf project.tar

Or separate ZIP archives of code and DVC-tracked data (POSIX terminal with zip):

$ git archive -o code.zip HEAD
$ dvc list . -R --dvc-only | zip -@ data.zip

ZIP alternative for POSIX on Windows (Python installed):

$ dvc list . -R --dvc-only | xargs python -m zipfile -c data.zip