list

List repository contents, including files, models, and directories tracked by DVC (as outputs) and by Git.

Synopsis

usage: dvc list [-h] [-q | -v] [-R] [--dvc-only] [--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

DVC, by effectively replacing data files, models, directories with .dvc files (.dvc), hides actual locations and names. This means that you don't see data files when you browse a DVC repository on Git hosting (e.g. GitHub), you just see the dvc.yaml and .dvc files. This makes it hard to navigate the project to find files or directories for use with dvc get, dvc import, or dvc.api functions.

dvc list prints a virtual view of a DVC repository, as if files and directories tracked by DVC were found directly in the remote Git repo. Only the root directory is listed by default. The output of this command is equivalent to actually cloning the repo and pulling its data 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.

The optional path argument is used to specify a directory to list within the source repository 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, and similar to the former, the -R option might 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.
-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
.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: