Universe Search

Search Roboflow Universe projects, datasets, and models programmatically with the Python SDK.

Python SDK

Roboflow Universe is the public catalog of community-shared projects, datasets, and models. The Python SDK exposes a low-level adapter you can use to search Universe programmatically.

Search

from roboflow.adapters import rfapi

results = rfapi.search_universe(
    "vehicles",
    api_key="YOUR_API_KEY",
    project_type="object-detection",  # optional
    limit=12,
    page=1,
)

for project in results.get("results", []):
    print(project["workspace"], project["project"], project["name"])

Parameters

• query (str, positional) - search term.

• api_key (str, kw-only) - your Roboflow API key. Required for Universe rate limits.

• project_type (str, kw-only, optional) - filter by project type. One of object-detection, classification, instance-segmentation, semantic-segmentation, keypoint-detection.

• limit (int, kw-only, default 12) - page size.

• page (int, kw-only, default 1) - 1-indexed page number.

Response

The function returns the JSON response body verbatim. Each result entry includes the workspace slug, project slug, project name, type, image count, and (for trained models) version metadata you can plug straight into Roboflow().workspace(...).project(...).version(...).model.predict().

Each result also includes thumbnail and annotationThumbnail fields (both nullable strings). thumbnail is a URL to the project's thumbnail image, and annotationThumbnail is a URL to a sample annotated image from the project. Either field is null when the corresponding data is unavailable.

Run a Universe model directly

Once you've found a model with search_universe, run inference on it the same way you would your own model:

import roboflow

rf = roboflow.Roboflow(api_key="YOUR_API_KEY")
project = rf.workspace("roboflow-100").project("poker-cards-cxcvz")
model = project.version(1).model

predictions = model.predict("hand.jpg", confidence=50, overlap=30).json()

See Run a Model on an Image for details on predict() across task types.

CLI

You can search for public datasets and models on Roboflow Universe from the command line.

Search Universe

roboflow universe search "hard hats"

roboflow universe search "hard hats" --json

Options

Flag	Description
--type	Filter by dataset or model
--limit	Maximum number of results (default: 12)

Examples

Search for datasets only:

roboflow universe search "safety vest" --type dataset

Limit results:

roboflow universe search "license plates" --type model --limit 5

JSON Output

Use --json for structured output that's safe to pipe:

roboflow universe search "hard hats" --json | jq '.[].name'
roboflow universe search "cars" --type dataset --limit 3 --json

Exit codes: 0 = success, 1 = error, 2 = auth error.