Download a Gensim Corpus with a Proxy and a Chosen Cache Directory

Set urllib's proxy environment and GENSIM_DATA_DIR before the downloader starts; using the CLI does not change its HTTP backend.

https_proxy=http://proxy.example:8080 \
GENSIM_DATA_DIR=/path/to/gensim-data \
python -m gensim.downloader --download text8

This POSIX launch supplies the HTTPS proxy and data directory before importing Gensim's downloader, then downloads text8 and returns its local path. Choose an HTTP endpoint from the HTTP proxy list for a public download route, and replace the directory with the intended path.

GENSIM_DATA_DIR is read into the module's base directory during import. Its default is ~/gensim-data, so setting it after importing gensim.downloader is too late for that initialization.

The CLI calls the same load function used by Python code and uses urllib. In an application, api.load(name, return_path=True) selects download-only behavior rather than loading the dataset into memory.

For a remaining failure, distinguish the index request from the artifact request. The index comes from GitHub's raw-content host; files come from releases and may redirect to other destinations. The local information cache can let index lookup continue after a network failure. Existing data can avoid another file download. A warm load therefore does not establish that both network paths worked.

Mikanda mikatakata