GitHub Actions fails when NLTK "punkt" is needed

Question

I have written some code which needs to use NLTK's punkt. I have included nltk in the requirements.txt and in the setup.py. However, when I run the build of my project using GitHub actions, it fails with this error.

E       LookupError:   
E       **********************************************************************  
E         Resource punkt not found.  
E         Please use the NLTK Downloader to obtain the resource:  
E       
E         >>> import nltk  
E         >>> nltk.download('punkt')

What is the standard way to tell GitHub actions that it needs 'punkt' without hard coding nltk.download('punkt') somewhere into the code? Should I add a line in the ci.yml file, and what is the best way to do it?

I have found a way of fixing this by adding `echo -e "import nltk\nnltk.download('punkt')" | python3` to the `ci.yml` before running the tests with pytest. However, any more elegant solution is very welcome. — andrea, Jun 06 '20 at 21:02
Also just used the `ci.yml` change that andrea proposed. Seems to be working :D — angerhang, Jul 07 '20 at 23:29

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 16 '20 at 16:41

2

In the ci.yml file, adding the nltk.downloader commandline after importing dependencies defined in requirements.txt worked for me.

if [ -f requirements.txt ]; then pip install -r requirements.txt; fi
python -m nltk.downloader punkt stopwords

answered Nov 16 '20 at 16:41

Thomas Wright

124
2
6

score -1 · Answer 2 · edited May 15 '23 at 12:06

For me this command does not work:

import nltk
nltk.download()

but I still have a solution to this problem, that worked for me.

You have to manually download the punkt file yourself, but while writing this the site is not working but I got you covered so you can download it from here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230206063107/https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nltk/nltk_data/gh-pages/packages/tokenizers/punkt.zip

after downloading the file you have to go to

C:\Users\name\AppData\Roaming\

If the nltk_data folder does not exist then create one and go inside the folder and create an other folder named tokenizers and extract the punkt.zip file inside the tokenizers folder.

I hope this helps

GitHub Actions fails when NLTK "punkt" is needed

2 Answers2