Why does my CrawlerProcess not have the function “crawl”?

Question

import scrapy
from scrapy.crawler import CrawlerProcess
from scrapy.contrib.spiders import CrawlSpider, Rule
from scrapy.contrib.linkextractors import LinkExtractor
from items import BackpageItem, CityvibeItem
from scrapy.shell import inspect_response
import re
import time
import sys

class MySpider(CrawlSpider):
    name = 'example'
    allowed_domains = ['www.example.com']

    # Set last_age to decide how many pages are crawled
    last_page = 10
    start_urls = ['http://www.example.com/washington/?page=%s' % page for page in xrange(1,last_page)]

    rules = (

        #Follow all links inside <div class="cat"> and calls parse_item on each link
        Rule(LinkExtractor(
            restrict_xpaths=('//a[@name="listing_link"]')),
            callback='parse_item'),

    )

    # Extract relevent text from the website into a ExampleItem
    def parse_item(self, response):
        item = ExampleItem()

        item['title'] = response.xpath('string(//h2[@class="post-title"]/text())').extract()
        item['desc'] = response.xpath('string(//div[@class="section post-body"]/text())').extract()
        item['url'] = response.url
        item['location'] = response.xpath('string(//div[@class="posting"]/div[2]/text())').extract()       
        item['posted_date'] = response.xpath('string(//div[@class="post-date"]/span/text())').extract()#.re("(?<=Posted\s*).*")
        item['crawled_date'] = time.strftime("%c")
        # not sure how to get the other image urls right now
        item['image_urls'] = response.xpath('string(//div[@class="section post-contact-container"]/div/div/img/@src)').extract()
        # I can't find this section on any pages right now
        item['other_ad_urls'] = response.xpath('//a[@name="listing_link"]/@href').extract()
        item['phone_number'] = "".join(response.xpath('//div[@class="post-info"]/span[contains(text(), "Phone")]/following-sibling::a/text()').extract())

        item['email'] = "".join(response.xpath('//div[@class="post-info"]/span[contains(text(), "Email")]/following-sibling::a/text()').extract())
        item['website'] = "".join(response.xpath('//div[@class="post-info limit"]/span[contains(text(), "Website")]/following-sibling::a/text()').extract())
        item['name'] = response.xpath('//div[@class="post-name"]/text()').extract()

        #uncomment for debugging
        #inspect_response(response, self)
        return item

# process1 = CrawlerProcess({
#     'ITEM_PIPELINES': {
#     #'scrapy.contrib.pipeline.images.ImagesPipeline': 1
#     'backpage.pipelines.GeolocationPipeline': 4,
#     'backpage.pipelines.LocationExtractionPipeline': 3,
#     'backpage.pipelines.BackpagePipeline': 5
#     }

# });

    process1 = CrawlerProcess({
        'USER_AGENT': 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)'
    })



    process1.crawl(MySpider)
    process1.start()

My spider works perfectly when I run it from the command line with

scrapy crawl example

but I will need to run multiple spiders, so I want to put them all in a script and use CrawlerProcess. When I try to run this I get the error,

AttributeError: 'CrawlerProcess' object has no attribute 'crawl'

This is scrapy version 0.24.6. All items and pipelines are correct, because the spider works from the command line.

Answer 1

There is (was?) a compatibility problem between Scrapy and Scrapyd. I needed to run Scrapy 0.24 and Scrapyd 1.0.1. Here is the issue on Github https://github.com/scrapy/scrapyd/issues/100#issuecomment-115268880