Can't import en_core_web_trf: AttributeError: module 'spacy.lang.en' has no attribute '__all__'

How to reproduce the behaviour

I am using what loads at this time as spacy-nightly[transformers,cuda100], on Google Colab’s Python3.

The following code was run:

!pip install snorkel spacy-nightly[transformers,cuda100] --pre

import spacy
import spacy_transformers

from spacy.cli import download
download("en_core_web_trf")

nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_trf")

The following exception occurs:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
AttributeError                            Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-19-911d29e313e9> in <module>()
----> 1 nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_trf")

7 frames
/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/spacy/util.py in get_lang_class(lang)

AttributeError: module 'spacy.lang.en' has no attribute '__all__'

Your Environment

• Operating System: (Colab) Linux 5a8332f5cac4 4.19.112+ #1 SMP Thu Jul 23 08:00:38 PDT 2020 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
• Python Version Used: Python 3.6.9
• spaCy Version Used: spacy-nightly==3.0.0rc5
• Environment Information: Rain.

[rjurney]

You were correct. I had installed spacy-nightly without uninstalling the included spacy first. Then I installed spacy-nightly and removed the original spacy, which messed things up.

The solution to install this in Colab is:

!yes | pip uninstall spacy
!pip install spacy-nightly[cuda100,transformers] --pre

After this the following code runs fine:

import spacy
import spacy_transformers
from spacy.cli import download


download("en_core_web_trf")
nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_trf")

However, download now seems superfluous according to the debug output, since load can download.

@honnibal is there a relevant place in the documentation to add this? I would like to make my first PR if there is 😃

[rjurney]

@ines could I update the install instructions for Colab?