Ensure Spacy NLP model is downloaded by Heroku in production

app.py

@@ -11,6 +11,7 @@ from flask_login import LoginManager, current_user
 from flask_sqlalchemy import SQLAlchemy
 from werkzeug.security import generate_password_hash
 from database import db
+import spacy
 
 csrf = CSRFProtect()
 
@@ -26,6 +27,14 @@ def create_app():
 
     # Heroku deployment
     if app.config['ENV'] == 'production':
+        # Deal with spacy model downloading
+        spacy_model = 'en_core_web_sm'
+        try:
+            spacy.load(spacy_model)
+        except:  # If not present, we download
+            spacy.cli.download(spacy_model)
+            spacy.load(spacy_model)
+
         app.config['SECRET_KEY'] = os.getenv('SECRET_KEY')
         app.config['SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI'] = os.getenv('DATABASE_URL', '').replace('postgres://', 'postgresql://', 1)