Problem to load spacy in Google Cloud Functions but not locally

I have a Cloud Function like this one:

import spacy

def entities():
 
    NER = spacy.load("en_core_web_sm")
    text='Looking for a Recruiting Data Analyst who can follow written instructions to correctly identify qualifying attributes from a candidates profile, load and properly code candidates in our recruiting database/CRM'
    text_entities= NER(text)
    entity_vector=[[word.text,word.label_] for word in text_entities.ents]

    return print('Function finished')

entities()

For some reason, If I execute this in my computer, there is no issues, but if I load it in my function, then I get:

> OSError: [E050] Can't find model 'en_core_web_sm'. It doesn't seem to be a Python package or a valid path to a data directory.
> Please visit https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/troubleshooting for in-depth troubleshooting documentation.

I tried importing 'en_core_web_sm' directly, but I had other issues with it. I wonder If I can manually get where is Google Function saving spacy, becouse I guess that when I look for it, the environment is looking for it in the wrong place.

This may solve your problem:

import spacy
import os

os.system("python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm")

def entities():
 
    NER = spacy.load("en_core_web_sm")
    text='Looking for a Recruiting Data Analyst who can follow written instructions to correctly identify qualifying attributes from a candidates profile, load and properly code candidates in our recruiting database/CRM'
    text_entities= NER(text)
    entity_vector=[[word.text,word.label_] for word in text_entities.ents]

    return print('Function finished')

entities()

For me it worked to add the model to the requirements.txt (as the download python -m spacy command is not executed during deployment:

spacy<3.0.0
https://github.com/explosion/spacy-models/releases/download/en_core_web_sm-2.3.0/en_core_web_sm-2.3.0.tar.gz#egg=en_core_web_sm

and then load it by

import en_core_web_sm
NER = en_core_web_sm.load()

Perhaps also the current version 3.5 of spaCy and the model works, but I use firebase and that version was causing a dependency conflict with the firebase_functions package, so I kept v2.3 for now...