I'm sorry that this conflicted with your plans, but I feel strongly that distributing Python libraries via system package managers such as apt is very bad for users. The pain is felt especially by users who are relatively new to Python, who will end up with their system Python in a confusing state that is difficult to correct.

We of course encourage anyone to clone the repo or install from an sdist if they want to compile from source. In fact you can do the following:

    git clone https://github.com/explosion/spaCy
    cd spaCy
    make

This will build you a standalone executable file, in the pex format, that only depends on your system Python and does not install any files into your system. You can copy this artifact into your bin and use it as a command-line application.