If you’re a frequent user of spacy and virtualenv you might well be all too familiar with the following:

python -m spacy download en_core_web_lg
Collecting en_core_web_lg==2.0.0 from https://github.com/explosion/spacy-models/releases/download/en_core_web_lg-2.0.0/en_core_web_lg-2.0.0.tar.gz#egg=en_core_web_lg==2.0.0
Downloading https://github.com/explosion/spacy-models/releases/download/en_core_web_lg-2.0.0/en_core_web_lg-2.0.0.tar.gz (852.3MB)
5% |█▉ | 49.8MB 11.5MB/s eta 0:01:10

If you’re lucky and you have a decent internet connection then great, if not it’s time to make a cup of tea.

Even if your internet connection is good. Did you ever stop to look at how much disk space your python virtual environments were using up? I recently found that about 40GB of disk space on my laptop was being used by spacy models I’d downloaded and forgotten about.

Fear not – spacy link offers you salvation from this wasteful use of disk space.

Spacy link essentially allows you to link your virtualenv copy of spacy to a copy of the model you already downloaded. Say you installed your desired spacy model to your global python3 installation – somewhere like** _/usr/lib/python3/site-packages/spacy/data_**** __**

Spacy link will let you link your existing model into a virtualenv to save redownloading (and using extra disk space). From your virtualenv you can do:

python -m spacy link ** /usr/lib/python3/site-packages/spacy/data/<name_of_model> **

For example if we wanted to make the en_core_web_lg the default english model model in our virtualenv we could do

python -m spacy link ** /usr/lib/python3/site-packages/spacy/data/en_core_web_lg en**

Presto! Now when we do spacy.load(‘en’) inside our virtualenv we get the large model!