Resource 'corpora/wordnet' not found on Heroku

I was getting this issue. For those who are not working in virtual environment, will need to download to following directory in ubuntu:

/usr/share/nltk_data/corpora/wordnet

Instead of wordnet it could be brown or whatever.
You can directly run this command in your terminal if you want to download the corpus.

$ sudo python -m nltk.downloader -d /usr/share/nltk_data wordnet

Again instead of wordnet it could be brown.

For Mac OS user only.

python -m nltk.downloader -d /usr/share/nltk_data wordnet

the corpora data can’t be downloaded directly to the /usr/share/nltk_data folder. error reports “no permission”, two solutions:

1. Add additional permission change to the Mac system, details refer to Operation Not Permitted when on root El capitan (rootless disabled) . However, I don’t want to change to mac default setting just for this corpora. and I go for the second solution.

2. • Download the corpora to any directory you have the access to. `python -m nltk.downloader -d some_user_accessable_directory wordnet’. Noted, there you only download the required corpora, e.g., wordnet, reuters instead of the whole corpora from nltk.

   • Add path to nltk path. In py file, add following lines:

     import nltk
nltk.data.path.append('nltk_data')

Update

As Kenneth Reitz pointed out, a much simpler solution has been added to the heroku-python-buildpack. Add a nltk.txt file to your root directory and list your corpora inside. See https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/python-nltk for details.

Original Answer

Here’s a cleaner solution that allows you to install the NLTK data directly on Heroku without adding it to your git repo.

I used similar steps to install Textblob on Heroku, which uses NLTK as a dependency. I’ve made some minor adjustments to my original code in steps 3 and 4 that should work for an NLTK only installation.

The default heroku buildpack includes a post_compile step that runs after all of the default build steps have been completed:

# post_compile
#!/usr/bin/env bash

if [ -f bin/post_compile ]; then
    echo "-----> Running post-compile hook"
    chmod +x bin/post_compile
    sub-env bin/post_compile
fi

As you can see, it looks in your project directory for your own post_compile file in the bin directory, and it runs it if it exists. You can use this hook to install the nltk data.

1. Create the bin directory in the root of your local project.

2. Add your own post_compile file to the bin directory.

   # bin/post_compile
   #!/usr/bin/env bash
   
   if [ -f bin/install_nltk_data ]; then
       echo "-----> Running install_nltk_data"
       chmod +x bin/install_nltk_data
       bin/install_nltk_data
   fi
   
   echo "-----> Post-compile done"
   

3. Add your own install_nltk_data file to the bin directory.

   # bin/install_nltk_data
   #!/usr/bin/env bash
   
   source $BIN_DIR/utils
   
   echo "-----> Starting nltk data installation"
   
   # Assumes NLTK_DATA environment variable is already set
   # $ heroku config:set NLTK_DATA='/app/nltk_data'
   
   # Install the nltk data
   # NOTE: The following command installs the wordnet corpora, 
   # so you may want to change for your specific needs.  
   # See http://www.nltk.org/data.html
   python -m nltk.downloader wordnet
   
   # If using Textblob, use this instead:
   # python -m textblob.download_corpora lite
   
   # Open the NLTK_DATA directory
   cd ${NLTK_DATA}
   
   # Delete all of the zip files
   find . -name "*.zip" -type f -delete
   
   echo "-----> Finished nltk data installation"
   

4. Add nltk to your requirements.txt file (Or textblob if you are using Textblob).

5. Commit all of these changes to your repo.

6. Set the NLTK_DATA environment variable on your heroku app.

   $ heroku config:set NLTK_DATA='/app/nltk_data'
   

7. Deploy to Heroku. You will see the post_compile step trigger at the end of the deployment, followed by the nltk download.

I hope you found this helpful! Enjoy!

Heroku now officially supports NLTK data, built-in!

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/python-nltk

This one works:

For Mac OS users.

python -m nltk.downloader -d /usr/local/share/nltk_data wordnet

I faced the exact same problem while deploying a chatbot on Heroku platform. Although the answer from follyroof is a fool-proof solution, but in many cases, the size of the repository would be increased drastically.

So, I used the nltk.download(‘PACKAGE’) in my app.py file. This way whenever app.py is run, the dependencies are automatically downloaded.

I could only solve my problem with this solution:

https://github.com/gunthercox/ChatterBot/issues/930#issuecomment-322111087

It is a workaround related to SSL.

I know this is an old question, but since the “right” answer has changed thanks to Heroku offering support for nltk, I thought it might be worthwhile to answer.

Heroku now supports nltk. If you need to download something for nltk (wordnet in this example, or perhaps stopwords or a corpora), you can do so by simply including an nltk.txt file in the same root directory where you have your Procfile and requirements.txt. In your nltk.txt file you list each item you would like to download. For a project I just deployed I needed stopwords and wordnet, so my nltk.txt looks like this:

stopwords

wordnet

Pretty straightforward. And, of course, make sure you have the appropriate version of nltk specified in your Pipfile or requirements.txt. For the ground truth, visit https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/python-nltk.

I faced the same error. This workaround by Fred Foo helped me to fix the issue
The following works for me:

# 1) execute the below written code 
# 2) a NLTK Download window will open
# 3) select "Corpora" tab and scroll down until "wordnet"
# 4) doubleclick to install

nltk.download()
from nltk.corpus import wordnet

Import WordNet In NLTK

I faced the same problem and I tried this solution and it is works. I just did put these:

import nltk
nltk.download('wordnet')

in the above code and it is run without problem.
so try it maybe help you.

I was also facing the issue when i tried to use this code lemmatizer.lemmatize(‘goes’), its actually because of packages they have not downloaded.
so try to download them using following code, may be it can solve many problems regarding to these,

nltk.download(‘wordnet’)
nltk.download(‘omw-1.4’)

Thank You..

On Mac:

I still needed to download the omw-1.4 data. The code was running from an Python file and the nltk_data/ directory is in the same directory like the Python file.

nltk.download('wordnet', "nltk_data/")

nltk.download('omw-1.4', "nltk_data/")

nltk.data.path.append('nltk_data/')