docs/DEPLOY_HF_SPACES.md

Deploy the live demo on Hugging Face Spaces

The repo ships everything an HF Docker Space needs (HF's create API only accepts gradio | docker | static, so the Streamlit app runs via Docker):

1. Dockerfile — installs the package (pip install ".[app]") + en_core_web_lg, then runs streamlit run streamlit_app.py on port 8501.
2. README.md front-matter — sdk: docker, app_port: 8501 (the Space card config).

The Space downloads the NHS dataset from Hugging Face at first run; if that fails it falls back to paste-only mode.

One-time deploy

# 1) log in (HF token with WRITE scope: https://huggingface.co/settings/tokens)
hf auth login

# 2) create the Space (Docker SDK, free cpu-basic) — or use https://huggingface.co/new-space
hf repos create <HF_USERNAME>/noteguard --repo-type space --space-sdk docker

# 3) push main to the Space's main branch
git remote add space https://huggingface.co/spaces/<HF_USERNAME>/noteguard
git push space main

Uses the hf CLI from huggingface_hub >= 1.0 (huggingface-cli still works as a deprecated alias).

The Space builds the image (Presidio + spaCy + en_core_web_lg, ~3–5 min the first time), then serves the app at https://huggingface.co/spaces/<HF_USERNAME>/noteguard.

Updating an existing Space

After any change on main:

git push space main      # the Space rebuilds automatically

The Dockerfile is the single source of truth for the entry point (streamlit_app.py) and the model, so renames in the repo never require changing Space settings — just push.

Notes

• Resource-constrained? If the build is slow or the Space OOMs, change en_core_web_lg to en_core_web_sm in the Dockerfile.
• Front-matter lives at the top of README.md; GitHub renders it as a small table — harmless.