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If you've been modifying the pipeline, vocabulary, vectors and entities, or made
updates to the model, you'll eventually want to save your progress – for
example, everything that's in your nlp object. This means you'll have to
translate its contents and structure into a format that can be saved, like a
file or a byte string. This process is called serialization. spaCy comes with
built-in serialization methods and supports the
Pickle protocol.
What's pickle?
Pickle is Python's built-in object persistence system. It lets you transfer arbitrary Python objects between processes. This is usually used to load an object to and from disk, but it's also used for distributed computing, e.g. with PySpark or Dask. When you unpickle an object, you're agreeing to execute whatever code it contains. It's like calling
eval()on a string – so don't unpickle objects from untrusted sources.
All container classes, i.e. Language (nlp),
Doc, Vocab and StringStore
have the following methods available:
| Method | Returns | Example |
|---|---|---|
to_bytes |
bytes | data = nlp.to_bytes() |
from_bytes |
object | nlp.from_bytes(data) |
to_disk |
- | nlp.to_disk("/path") |
from_disk |
object | nlp.from_disk("/path") |