Allow configuration of base directory

[prevostc]

I was able to make newspaper work on aws lambda with this PR update and the following code

# only /tmp is writable on lambda env
os.environ['NEWSPAPER_BASE_DIRECTORY'] = '/tmp'
os.environ['NLTK_DATA'] = '/tmp'

# https://stackoverflow.com/a/44532317/2523414
# no sqlite in lambda, needed by a small subset of nltk
import imp
import sys
sys.modules["sqlite"] = imp.new_module("sqlite")
sys.modules["sqlite3.dbapi2"] = imp.new_module("sqlite.dbapi2")

from newspaper import Article
import nltk
nltk.download('punkt')

This PR is also handy for AWS Beanstalk as the /home/wsgi folder do not exists and you also need to configure the directory

[codelucas]

Great idea, thanks for implementing this @prevostc. Will take a look / test and likely merge in a few days! 👍 💯

[torbenbrodt]

+1

[prevostc]

This PR is now 1.5 year old, which is a billion serverless years. I'm closing it :)

[mkilp]

Why did this not get merged? This is really needed in my opinion.

[vchalana1]

Hello, Is this change in the 0.2.8 release? I did a pip install of the latest release as of March 2, 2020, and I don't see any NEWSPAPER_BASE_DIRECTORY.