Unclear error message when unable to cache the model

I encountered the following error:

[2019-05-07 11:06:51,904: ERROR/ForkPoolWorker-1] Model name 'bert-base-uncased'
was not found in model name list (bert-base-uncased, bert-large-uncased, bert-base-cased,
bert-large-cased, bert-base-multilingual-uncased, bert-base-multilingual-cased,
bert-base-chinese).
We assumed 'https://s3.amazonaws.com/models.huggingface.co/bert/bert-base-uncased.tar.gz'
was a path or url but couldn't find any file associated to this path or url. 

After some debugging, I found that the root cause of the issue was the fact that the application is unable to cache the model in the home directory. It was a simple I/O error rather than an issue with the model name or file downloading, as the message suggests. I think it would be worth it to handle this case with an appropriate message, and what’s more important - throwing an exception.

In my case, I did get the error logs, but the application initiated “successfully” - with the tokenizer and model set to None. If the library is not able to load the model for any reason, I’d expect it to throw an exception rather than just (almost) silently return a None.

[thomwolf]

Yes, this error message hides several potential sources, I’ll see if I can disentangle the error messages 😃

[thomwolf]

Yes, it should have been improved on the latest release 2.1.1 (with the merge of #1480).

Maybe open a new issue with clear details of the current issue?