Using "Spacy package" on trained model: error "Can't locate model data" - spacy

Question

I'm attempting to train the NER within SpaCy to recognize a new set of entities. Everything works just fine until I try to save and reload the model.
I'm attempting to follow the SpaCy doc recommendations from https://spacy.io/usage/training#saving-loading, so I have been saving with:
model.to_disk("save_this_model")
and then going to the Command Line and attempting to turn it into a package using:
python -m spacy package save_this_model saved_model_package
so I can then use
spacy.load('saved_model_package')
to pull the model back up.
However, when I'm attempting to use spacy package from the Command Line, I keep getting the error message "Can't locate model data"
I've looked in the save_this_model file and there is a meta.json there, as well as folders for the various pipes (I've tried this with all pipes saved and the non-NER pipes disabled, neither works).
Does anyone know what I might be doing wrong here?
I'm pretty inexperienced, so I think it's very possible that I'm attempting to make a package incorrectly or committing some other basic error. Thank you very much for your help in advance!

Answer 1

The spacy package command will create an installable and loadable Python package based on your model data, which you can then pip install and store in a single .tar.gz file. If you just want to load a model you've saved out, you usually don't even need to package it – you can simply pass the path to the model directory to spacy.load. For example:
nlp = spacy.load('/path/to/save_this_model')
spacy.load can take either a path to a model directory, a model package name or the name of a shortcut link, if available.
If you're new to spaCy and just experimenting with training models, loading them from a directory is usually the simplest solution. Model packages come in handy if you want to share your model with others (because you can share it as one installable file), or if you want to integrate it into your CI workflow or test suite (because the model can be a component of your application, like any other package it depends on).
So if you do want a Python package, you'll first need to build it by running the package setup from within the directory created by spacy package:
cd saved_model_package
python setup.py sdist
You can find more details here in the docs. The above command will create a .tar.gz archive in a directory /dist, which you can then install in your environment.
pip install /path/to/en_example_model-1.0.0.tar.gz
If the model installed correctly, it should show up in the installed packages when you run pip list or pip freeze. To load it, you can call spacy.load with the package name, which is usually the language code plus the name you specified when you packaged the model. In this example, en_example_model:
nlp = spacy.load('en_example_model')