spacy.cli.download is no longer available

[omri374]

In the last release (3.7.0), the ability to call spacy.cli.download(MODEL) is no longer available.
Is there another way to download models through a Python script, or can the spacy.cli package be reintroduced?

In our use case, we propose the use of downloaded spacy models by default. If the user inputted a spacy model name which isn't installed, we wish to install it lazily, therefore the CLI command isn't a good fit for us.

Potentially an outcome of #12962

How to reproduce the behaviour

import spacy

spacy.cli.download("en_core_web_lg")

# AttributeError: module 'spacy' has no attribute 'cli'

Your Environment

• spaCy version: 3.7.0
• Platform: macOS-14.0-arm64-arm-64bit
• Python version: 3.9.16
• Pipelines: el_core_news_lg (3.5.0), en_core_web_lg (3.6.0), sv_core_news_sm (3.6.0), en_core_web_sm (3.6.0), en_core_web_trf (3.5.0), es_core_news_sm (3.5.0), es_core_news_md (3.5.0), en_core_web_md (3.5.0)

[adrianeboyd]

That does look like an unintended side effect of #12962. My initial guess is that the best course of action will be to revert it.

[omri374]

Update: calling from spacy.cli import download works. It's just the specific availability of spacy.cli which had changed.

[adrianeboyd]

Yeah, we have do have plenty of tests including imports like from spacy.cli import download, but not for just spacy.cli or spacy.cli.download.

[adrianeboyd]

And I don't understand why this breaks the availability of the whole spacy.cli module. But it's pretty breaking, so we'll release v3.7.1 with this reverted.

[github-actions]

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