diff --git a/requirements.txt b/requirements.txt
index 3a777f163..074775ae8 100644
--- a/requirements.txt
+++ b/requirements.txt
@@ -15,6 +15,7 @@ numpy>=1.15.0
 requests>=2.13.0,<3.0.0
 tqdm>=4.38.0,<5.0.0
 pydantic>=1.5.0,<1.7.0
+jinja2
 # Official Python utilities
 setuptools
 packaging>=20.0
@@ -26,4 +27,3 @@ pytest>=4.6.5
 pytest-timeout>=1.3.0,<2.0.0
 mock>=2.0.0,<3.0.0
 flake8>=3.5.0,<3.6.0
-jinja2
diff --git a/spacy/cli/init_config.py b/spacy/cli/init_config.py
index 9f73b17ae..ff11f97f6 100644
--- a/spacy/cli/init_config.py
+++ b/spacy/cli/init_config.py
@@ -5,6 +5,7 @@ from wasabi import Printer, diff_strings
 from thinc.api import Config
 import srsly
 import re
+from jinja2 import Template
 
 from .. import util
 from ..language import DEFAULT_CONFIG_PRETRAIN_PATH
@@ -127,10 +128,6 @@ def init_config(
 ) -> None:
     is_stdout = str(output_file) == "-"
     msg = Printer(no_print=is_stdout)
-    try:
-        from jinja2 import Template
-    except ImportError:
-        msg.fail("This command requires jinja2", "pip install jinja2", exits=1)
     with TEMPLATE_PATH.open("r") as f:
         template = Template(f.read())
     # Filter out duplicates since tok2vec and transformer are added by template