Spacy packages not installable via (uv) pip

[jcorrie]

As discussed at huggingface/huggingface_hub/#2637, using "any" as the release version is causing issues with pip (particularly problematic if using uv pip).

Is this library still maintained? If so, I would be happy to look at implementing a fix for this.

[bsoviedo]

The docs uploaded the link that will give you access,

you will find that:

!pip install "https://huggingface.co/spacy/en_core_web_sm/resolve/main/en_core_web_sm-any-py3-none-any.whl"

probably will give you an error, but using it in this way:

!pip install "en_core_web_sm @ https://huggingface.co/spacy/en_core_web_sm/resolve/main/en_core_web_sm-any-py3-none-any.whl"

it would work (worked with my custom model)

[ivan-kleshnin]

Does not work since PIP v25 😞

error: The wheel filename "en_textcat_culture-any-py3-none-any.whl" has an invalid version: 
expected version to start with a number, but no leading ASCII digits were found

What do you guys suggest, should we use hf CLI?

[notatallshaw]

I can't reproduce @ivan-kleshnin's error but be aware that pip will stop accepting invalid wheel names next release (25.3 expected October 2025):

$ pip install "en_core_web_sm @ https://huggingface.co/spacy/en_core_web_sm/resolve/main/en_core_web_sm-any-py3-none-any.whl"
DEPRECATION: Wheel filename 'en_core_web_sm-any-py3-none-any.whl' is not correctly normalised. Future versions of pip will raise the following error:
Invalid wheel filename (invalid version): 'en_core_web_sm-any-py3-none-any'

 pip 25.3 will enforce this behaviour change. A possible replacement is to rename the wheel to use a correctly normalised name (this may require updating the version in the project metadata). Discussion can be found at https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/12938

Please see pypa/pip#12938 for details.

[Ibrokhimsadikov]

@ivan-kleshnin @notatallshaw do we have any workaround, i still see errors in pip 25.3; i can not install spacy hugging face model wheels. Should we expect change or this repo is no longer maintained

[notatallshaw]

@Ibrokhimsadikov here's a Python script that will download and fix the name of a wheel to match the internal metadata: https://gist.github.com/notatallshaw/670de438aa33f29cb59bfdc874760286

If you have uv or another tool that supports running scripts with inline metadata you can one-line it:

$ uv run "https://gist.githubusercontent.com/notatallshaw/670de438aa33f29cb59bfdc874760286/raw/4f55083a8ce54b852581d815d09c5529af8f245b/download-and-fix-wheel.py" "https://huggingface.co/spacy/en_core_web_sm/resolve/main/en_core_web_sm-any-py3-none-any.whl"
pip install /home/damian/en-core-web-sm-3.7.1-py3-none-any.whl

P.S Ignore previous post if you saw it, forgot to test the gist script before posting.