How to Install spaCy on PyCharm?

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spaCy is an open-source Python library for advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Problem Formulation: Given a PyCharm project. How to install the spaCy library in your project within a virtual environment or globally?

Here’s a solution that always works:

  • Open File > Settings > Project from the PyCharm menu.
  • Select your current project.
  • Click the Python Interpreter tab within your project tab.
  • Click the small + symbol to add a new library to the project.
  • Now type in the library to be installed, in your example "spacy" without quotes, and click Install Package.
  • Wait for the installation to terminate and close all popup windows.

Here’s the installation process as a short animated video—it works analogously for spaCy, just type in “spacy” in the search field instead:

Make sure to select only “spacy” because there are many other packages that are not required but also contain the term “spacy” (False positives):

Alternatively, you can use the following three commands in your PyCharm “Terminal” view to install spaCy:

pip install -U pip setuptools wheel
pip install -U spacy
python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm

Just copy&paste those commands into the Terminal and wait for termination of the installation process. The following graphic shows how the process looks like for the first two commands. As the second command’s output is pretty large, you cannot see the third command—but it is there! 🙂

Strictly speaking, you don’t necessarily need the first and last commands and you don’t nee the -U flag of the second pip command. But it’s the proper method proposed in the official docs.

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