Put spaCy data in a shared path

Would it be possible to have spaCy data work similarly to NLTK_data where it goes to a shared path, i.e., C:\nltk_data for Windows, /usr/local/share/nltk_data for macOS, or /usr/share/nltk_data for Unix (obviously substituting spacy_data for nltk_data)?

I understand that I can have it download to a custom location but it would be nice to have it look for it automatically rather than having to set spacy.util.set_data_path() before calling spacy.load(), or by passing a path argument to spacy.en.English.

My use case for this is deploying it in computer labs, were it’d be preferable for me to be able to package and deploy the data without each user having to download it individually. Especially in cases where each user has an ~/anaconda folder since the data downloads to ~/anaconda/lib/python3.5/site-packages/spacy/en/data for each user. It’d be (selfishly) easier for a user to be able to use spacy without me telling them where the data is and without them filling up the HD.

If there’s a reason that it’s done the way it currently is, that’s fine 😃

[ines]

Just to give you a heads-up – this will be fixed in v1.7!

You’ll be able to store your data wherever you want, and download and install models directly, or using the new spacy.download command. Models can be installed as Python packages via pip or loaded in manually. There’ll also be a new command spacy.link that lets you set up symlinks for your models (local directory or installed Python package), so you can load them by name, e.g. spacy.load('my_cool_model'). This will also make it much easier to use your own models with spaCy.

We’re just in the process of reuploading all the models (taking a bit longer than expected, because we’ve trained new models and decided to provide different options, i.e. with GloVe vectors and without). But as soon as they’re up, we’ll push the new release and docs 🎉

/ cc: @cwhits, @jck

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