Bug: download en_core_web_sm fails with 404 due to malformed URL (missing version tag)

[HimanM]

When running python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm, the process fails with a HTTP 404 error. Upon inspecting the error log, the URL being generated appears to be malformed.

It seems the downloader is failing to inject the specific version number into the URL, resulting in a leading hyphen in the filename where the version usually sits.

URL generated:
https://github.com/explosion/spacy-models/releases/download/-en_core_web_sm/-en_core_web_sm.tar.gz

To Reproduce Run the following command:
python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm

Error Log

6.168 Collecting https://github.com/explosion/spacy-models/releases/download/-en_core_web_sm/-en_core_web_sm.tar.gz
6.644   ERROR: HTTP error 404 while getting https://github.com/explosion/spacy-models/releases/download/-en_core_web_sm/-en_core_web_sm.tar.gz
6.646 ERROR: Could not install requirement https://github.com/explosion/spacy-models/releases/download/-en_core_web_sm/-en_core_web_sm.tar.gz because of HTTP error 404 Client Error: Not Found for url: https://github.com/explosion/spacy-models/releases/download/-en_core_web_sm/-en_core_web_sm.tar.gz for URL https://github.com/explosion/spacy-models/releases/download/-en_core_web_sm/-en_core_web_sm.tar.g

Platform: Docker
Python version: python:3.11-slim

[honnibal]

Hm not sure what could be going wrong here. I just did a quick test on Python 3.10 and it worked:

Collecting en-core-web-sm==3.8.0
  Downloading https://github.com/explosion/spacy-models/releases/download/en_core_web_sm-3.8.0/en_core_web_sm-3.8.0-py3-none-any.whl (12.8 MB)
     ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 12.8/12.8 MB 1.8 MB/s eta 0:00:00
Installing collected packages: en-core-web-sm
Successfully installed en-core-web-sm-3.8.0

[notice] A new release of pip is available: 25.0.1 -> 25.3
[notice] To update, run: pip install --upgrade pip
✔ Download and installation successful
You can now load the package via spacy.load('en_core_web_sm')

I'll keep trying other things, maybe the pip version?

[honnibal]

Could you check what version of spaCy you have?

[HimanM]

3.8.0

[honnibal]

Try updating