Spacy: AssertionError when downloading models on pip 19.0, Ubuntu 18.10

[sbrother]

How to reproduce the problem

When running python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm, I am getting an AssertionError within pip internals. Since I've been using spacy forever and I'd never seen this before, I downgraded pip to 18.1 (from 19.0) and the error disappeared. I am on Pop!_OS, which is a thin layer over Ubuntu 18.10.

(venv) sam@pop-os:~/$ pip --version
pip 19.0 from /home/sam/venv/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pip (python 3.6)
(venv) sam@pop-os:~/$ python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm
Collecting en_core_web_sm==2.0.0 from https://github.com/explosion/spacy-models/releases/download/en_core_web_sm-2.0.0/en_core_web_sm-2.0.0.tar.gz#egg=en_core_web_sm==2.0.0
  Downloading https://github.com/explosion/spacy-models/releases/download/en_core_web_sm-2.0.0/en_core_web_sm-2.0.0.tar.gz (37.4MB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 37.4MB 78.8MB/s 
Exception:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/sam/venv/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pip/_internal/cli/base_command.py", line 176, in main
    status = self.run(options, args)
  File "/home/sam/venv/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pip/_internal/commands/install.py", line 346, in run
    session=session, autobuilding=True
  File "/home/sam/venv/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pip/_internal/wheel.py", line 848, in build
    assert building_is_possible
AssertionError
(venv) sam@pop-os:~/$ pip install pip==18.1
(venv) sam@pop-os:~/$ python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm
Collecting en_core_web_sm==2.0.0 from https://github.com/explosion/spacy-models/releases/download/en_core_web_sm-2.0.0/en_core_web_sm-2.0.0.tar.gz#egg=en_core_web_sm==2.0.0
  Downloading https://github.com/explosion/spacy-models/releases/download/en_core_web_sm-2.0.0/en_core_web_sm-2.0.0.tar.gz (37.4MB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 37.4MB 63.5MB/s 
Installing collected packages: en-core-web-sm
  Running setup.py install for en-core-web-sm ... done
Successfully installed en-core-web-sm-2.0.0

Your Environment

Info about spaCy

• spaCy version: 2.0.18
• Platform: Linux-4.18.0-13-generic-x86_64-with-Ubuntu-18.10-cosmic
• Python version: 3.6.7
• Models: en_core_web_sm

[sbrother]

This may be related to https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/6158

[ines]

Yes, the model downloader sets --no-cache-dir by default, to prevent the (potentially very large) model packages from being cached. So from that thread, it sounds like this is a more general pip issue and we just have to wait for a new pip update that resolves this?

Apparently another workaround is setting --cache-dir=/pipcache (any arbitrary directory manually) and then removing that cache? spacy download will pass all additional arguments down to the pip install call, so you could try python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm --cache-dir=/pipcache.

[tijsg]

a possible workaround is downgrading by issuing pip install pip==18 or if you specifically need python3, like usually on Mac: pip3 install pip==18

[nyejon]

New pip version seems to have resolved this

[tijsg]

New pip version seems to have resolved this

For others reading this: this refers to version 19.0.1

Issue can be closed.

[lock[bot]]

This thread has been automatically locked since there has not been any recent activity after it was closed. Please open a new issue for related bugs.