scrapy run spider from script

Question

I want to run my spider from a script rather than a scrap crawl

I found this page

http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/topics/practices.html

Answer 1

You can just create a normal Python script, and then use Scrapy's command line option runspider, that allows you to run a spider without having to create a project.

For example, you can create a single file stackoverflow_spider.py with something like this:

import scrapy

class QuestionItem(scrapy.item.Item):
    idx = scrapy.item.Field()
    title = scrapy.item.Field()

class StackoverflowSpider(scrapy.spider.Spider):
    name = 'SO'
    start_urls = ['http://stackoverflow.com']
    def parse(self, response):
        sel = scrapy.selector.Selector(response)
        questions = sel.css('#question-mini-list .question-summary')
        for i, elem in enumerate(questions):
            l = scrapy.contrib.loader.ItemLoader(QuestionItem(), elem)
            l.add_value('idx', i)
            l.add_xpath('title', ".//h3/a/text()")
            yield l.load_item()

Then, provided you have scrapy properly installed, you can run it using:

scrapy runspider stackoverflow_spider.py -t json -o questions-items.json

Answer 2

luckily scrapy source is open, so you can follow the way crawl command works and do the same in your code:

...
crawler = self.crawler_process.create_crawler()
spider = crawler.spiders.create(spname, **opts.spargs)
crawler.crawl(spider)
self.crawler_process.start()

Answer 3

Why don't you just do this?

from scrapy import cmdline

cmdline.execute("scrapy crawl myspider".split())

Put that script in the same path where you put scrapy.cfg

Answer 4

It is simple and straightforward :)

Just check the official documentation. I would make there a little change so you could control the spider to run only when you do python myscript.py and not every time you just import from it. Just add an if __name__ == "__main__":

import scrapy
from scrapy.crawler import CrawlerProcess

class MySpider(scrapy.Spider):
    # Your spider definition
    pass

if __name__ == "__main__":
    process = CrawlerProcess({
        'USER_AGENT': 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)'
    })

    process.crawl(MySpider)
    process.start() # the script will block here until the crawling is finished

Now save the file as myscript.py and run 'python myscript.py`.

Enjoy!