Kaggle is one of the most popular place to datasets for data science and machine learning. In Kaggle, you can publish datasets, build models, and collaborate with other scientists and engineers in competitions and win prizes.

In this guide, we discuss how to download datasets in Kaggle on your Ubuntu machine.

Prerequisites

On your Ubuntu Machine, ensure you have Python 3 and the package manager pip installed.

In Kaggle, find the dataset you want to download, and check the name of the dataset and the user that uploaded the dataset. You can find this in the URL of the dataset https://www.kaggle.com/<USER_NAME>/<DATASET_NAME>.

For example, if your dataset is located in https://www.kaggle.com/Cornell-University/arxiv,

• its DATASET_NAME is arxiv, and
• its USER_NAME is Cornell-University.

You should also have Kaggle account. If you don’t, create a new account here.

Step 1 - Download Kaggle API

Kaggle has a command-line API that can be installed using pip.

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pip install --user kaggle

pip will install Kaggle API and any required dependencies to your machine.

Step 2 - Setup API Credentials

Navigate to the Accounts page of Kaggle at https://www.kaggle.com/<USER_NAME>/account. Go to the “API” section and select the “Create New API Token”. This will trigger the download of kaggle.json, a file that contains your API credentials. The JSON has a single line of below format:

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{"username":<USER_NAME>,"key":<API_KEY>}

Make a directory .kaggle at root ~, and place kaggle.json in that directory. (~/.kaggle/kaggle.json)

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mkdir ~/.kaggle
mv kaggle.json ~/.kaggle

You can verify that the JSON was saved correctly by printing it using the cat command:

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cat ~/.kaggle/kaggle.json

For safety, edit the file permission to ensure that other users cannot read this file. You can use the chmod command to change the permission:

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chmod 600 ~/.kaggle/kaggle.json

Step 3 - Download Dataset

Now, you can download the dataset using Kaggle’s kaggle datasets download API. Navigate to the directory that you want to download the dataset to. Then, Check the USER_NAME and the DATASET_NAME that you noted in Prerequisites section of this tutorial, and paste it in the below template:

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kaggle datasets download <USER_NAME>/<DATASET_NAME>

For example, if your dataset came from https://www.kaggle.com/Cornell-University/arxiv, you should execute the following line:

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kaggle datasets download Cornell-University/arxiv

Kaggle API will display a progress bar and start downloading the dataset. Depending on the dataset size and your internet connection, you will have to wait a few seconds to a few hours to download the dataset.

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Downloading arxiv.zip to ~
100%|██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 877M/877M [00:28<00:00, 32.4MB/s]

Conclusion

Now that you have the dataset downloaded, you have many options to explore the data. Try using Jupyter Notebook with Pandas for exploratory data analysis (EDA).