Develop Reference

Scrapy - How can I load the project level settings.py while using a script to start the spider

Am trying to implement a scrapy spider which is started using a script as per below code.
from scrapy.crawler import CrawlerRunner
from scrapy_app.scrapy_app.spiders.generic import GenericSpider
....
class MyProcess(object):
def start_my_process(self, _config, _req_obj, site_urls):
runner = CrawlerRunner()
runner.crawl(GenericSpider,
config=_config,
reqObj=_req_obj,
urls=site_urls)
deferred = runner.join()
deferred.addBoth(lambda _: reactor.stop())
reactor.run()
....
So, using a CrawlerRunner, am not receiving the project level settings.py configurations while executing the spider. The Generic spider accepts three parameters in which one is the list of start urls.
How can we load the settings.py to the CrawlerRunner process other than setting custom_settings inside the spider?

I am going to try to answer this as best I can even though my situation is not 100% identical to yours, however, I was having similar issues.
The typical scrapy project structure looks like this:
scrapy.cfg
myproject/
__init__.py
items.py
middlewares.py
pipelines.py
settings.py
spiders/
__init__.py
spider1.py
spider2.py
...
The directory containing the scrapy.cfg file is considered the root directory of the project.
In that file you will see something like this:
[settings]
default: your_project.settings
[deploy]
...
When running your main script that calls on a spider to run with a specific set of settings you should have your main.py script in the same directory as the scrapy.cfg file.
Now from main.py your code is going to have to create a CrawlerProcess or CrawlerRunner instance to run a spider, of which either can be instantiated with a settings object or dict like so:
process = CrawlerProcess(settings={
'FEED_FORMAT': 'json',
'FEED_URI': 'items.json'
})
---------------------------------------
from scrapy.utils.project import get_project_settings
process = CrawlerProcess(get_project_settings())
The dict scenario works but it cumbersome, so the the get_project_settings() call is probably of greater interest which I will expand upon.
I had a large scrapy project that contained multiple spiders that shared a large number of similar settings. So I had a global_settings.py file and then specific settings contained within each spider. Because of the large number of shared settings I liked the idea of keeping everything neat and tidy in one file and not copying and pasting code.
The easiest way I have found after a lot of research is to instantiate the CrawlerProcess/Runner object with the get_project_settings() function, the catch is that get_project_settings uses the default value under [settings] in scrapy.cfg to find project specific settings.
So its important to make sure that for your project the scrapy.cfg settings default value points to your desired settings file when you call get_project_settings().
I'll also add that if you have multiple settings files for multiple scrapy projects and you want to share the root directory you can add those in to scrapy.cfg additionally like so:
[settings]
default = your_project.settings
project1 = myproject1.settings
project2 = myproject2.settings
Adding all these settings to the root directory config file will allow you the opportunity to switch between settings at will in scripts.
As I said before your out of the box call to get_project_settings() will load the default value's settings file for your spider from the scrapy.cfg file (your_project.settings in the example above), however, if you want to change the settings used for the next spider run in the same process you can modify the settings loaded for that spider to be started.
This is slightly tricky and "hackey" but it has worked for me...
After the first call to get_project_settings() an environment variable called SCRAPY_SETTINGS_MODULE will be set. This environment variable value will be set to whatever your default value was in the scrapy.cfg file. To alter the settings used to subsequent spiders that are run in the process instance created (CrawlerRunner/Process --> process.crawl('next_spider_to_start')), this variable will need to be manipulated.
This is what should be done to set a new settings module on a current process instance that previously had get_project_settings() instantiated with it:
import os
# Clear the old settings module
del os.environ['SCRAPY_SETTINGS_MODULE']
# Set the project environment variable (new set of settings), this should be a value in your scrapy.cfg
os.environ['SCRAPY_PROJECT'] = 'project2'
# Call get_project_settings again and set to process object
process.settings = get_project_settings()
# Run the next crawler with the updated settings module
process.crawl('next_spider_to_start')
get_project_settings() just updated the current process settings (Twisted Reactor) to myproject2.settings for your crawler process instance.
This can all be done from a main script to manipulate spiders and the settings for them. Like I said previously though, I found it easier to just have a global settings file with all the commonalities, and then spider specific settings set in the spiders themselves. This is usually much clearer.
Scrapy docs are kinda rough, hope this helps someone...

How to run and save scrapy state from a python script

In scrapy projects, we can get persistence support by defining a job directory through the JOBDIR setting for eg.
scrapy crawl somespider -s JOBDIR=crawls/somespider-1
But how to do the same when running spiders using scrapy.crawler.CrawlerProcess from a python script as answered in How to run Scrapy from within a Python script?

As your reference question points out you can pass settings to CrawlerProcess instance.
So all you need to do is pass JOBDIR setting:
import scrapy
from scrapy.crawler import CrawlerProcess
class MySpider(scrapy.Spider):
# Your spider definition
...
process = CrawlerProcess({
'JOBDIR': 'crawls/somespider-1' # <----- Here
})
process.crawl(MySpider)
process.start()

Getting scrapy project settings when script is outside of root directory

I have made a Scrapy spider that can be successfully run from a script located in the root directory of the project. As I need to run multiple spiders from different projects from the same script (this will be a django app calling the script upon the user's request), I moved the script from the root of one of the projects to the parent directory. For some reason, the script is no longer able to get the project's custom settings in order to pipeline the scraped results into the database tables. Here is the code from the scrapy docs I'm using to run the spider from a script:
def spiderCrawl():
settings = get_project_settings()
settings.set('USER_AGENT','Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)')
process = CrawlerProcess(settings)
process.crawl(MySpider3)
process.start()
Is there some extra module that needs to be imported in order to get the project settings from outside of the project? Or does there need to be some additions made to this code? Below I also have the code for the script running the spiders, thanks.
from ticket_city_scraper.ticket_city_scraper import *
from ticket_city_scraper.ticket_city_scraper.spiders import tc_spider
from vividseats_scraper.vividseats_scraper import *
from vividseats_scraper.vividseats_scraper.spiders import vs_spider
tc_spider.spiderCrawl()
vs_spider.spiderCrawl()

Thanks to some of the answers already provided here, I realised scrapy wasn't actually importing the settings.py file. This is how I fixed it.
TLDR: Make sure you set the 'SCRAPY_SETTINGS_MODULE' variable to your actual settings.py file. I'm doing this in the __init__() func of Scraper.
Consider a project with the following structure.
my_project/
main.py # Where we are running scrapy from
scraper/
run_scraper.py #Call from main goes here
scrapy.cfg # deploy configuration file
scraper/ # project's Python module, you'll import your code from here
__init__.py
items.py # project items definition file
pipelines.py # project pipelines file
settings.py # project settings file
spiders/ # a directory where you'll later put your spiders
__init__.py
quotes_spider.py # Contains the QuotesSpider class
Basically, the command
scrapy startproject scraper was executed in the my_project folder, I've added a run_scraper.py file to the outer scraper folder, a main.py file to my root folder, and quotes_spider.py to the spiders folder.
My main file:
from scraper.run_scraper import Scraper
scraper = Scraper()
scraper.run_spiders()
My run_scraper.py file:
from scraper.scraper.spiders.quotes_spider import QuotesSpider
from scrapy.crawler import CrawlerProcess
from scrapy.utils.project import get_project_settings
import os
class Scraper:
def __init__(self):
settings_file_path = 'scraper.scraper.settings' # The path seen from root, ie. from main.py
os.environ.setdefault('SCRAPY_SETTINGS_MODULE', settings_file_path)
self.process = CrawlerProcess(get_project_settings())
self.spider = QuotesSpider # The spider you want to crawl
def run_spiders(self):
self.process.crawl(self.spider)
self.process.start() # the script will block here until the crawling is finished
Also, note that the settings might require a look-over, since the path needs to be according to the root folder (my_project, not scraper).
So in my case:
SPIDER_MODULES = ['scraper.scraper.spiders']
NEWSPIDER_MODULE = 'scraper.scraper.spiders'
And repeat for all the settings variables you have!

It should work , can you share your scrapy log file
Edit:
your approach will not work
because ...when you execute the script..it will look for your default settings in
if you have set the environment variable ENVVAR
if you have scrapy.cfg file in you present directory from where you are executing your script and if that file points to valid settings.py directory ,it will load those settings...
else it will run with vanilla settings provided by scrapy ( your case)
Solution 1
create a cfg file inside the directory (outside folder) and give it a path to the valid settings.py file
Solution 2
make your parent directory package , so that absolute path will not be required and you can use relative path
i.e python -m cron.project1
Solution 3
Also you can try something like
Let it be where it is , inside the project directory..where it is working...
Create a sh file...
Line 1: Cd to first projects location ( root directory)
Line 2 : Python script1.py
Line 3. Cd to second projects location
Line 4: python script2.py
Now you can execute spiders via this sh file when requested by django

I have used this code to solve the problem:
from scrapy.settings import Settings
settings = Settings()
settings_module_path = os.environ.get('SCRAPY_ENV', 'project.settings.dev')
settings.setmodule(settings_module_path, priority='project')
print(settings.get('BASE_URL'))

this could happen because you are no longer "inside" a scrapy project, so it doesn't know how to get the settings with get_project_settings().
You can also specify the settings as a dictionary as the example here:
http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/topics/practices.html#run-scrapy-from-a-script

I used the OS module for this problem.
The python file you are running is in one directory and your scrapy project is in a different directory. You can not simply just import the python spider and run on this python script because the current directory you are working in does not have the settings.py file or the scrapy.cfg.
import os
To show the current directory you are working in use the following code:
print(os.getcwd())
From here you are going to want to change the current directory:
os.chdir(\path\to\spider\folder)
Lastly, tell os which command to execute.
os.system('scrape_file.py')

This is an addition to the answer of malla.
You can configure the settings, pipelines, spiders, etc modules variable. You dont need to pass them as strings. The big advantage is that you can run that spider from different places and you dont need to adjust the strings in the settings. You can do both: run from script (from anywhere, even from multiple different roots) and run with scrapy crawl without adjusting:
from ticket_city_scraper.ticket_city_scraper import settings # your setting module
def run_spider():
os.environ.setdefault('SCRAPY_SETTINGS_MODULE', settings.__name__)
process = CrawlerProcess(get_project_settings())
process.crawl(MySpider3)
process.start()
You can make the setting itself variable:
from . import spiders # your spiders module
from . import pipelines # your pipelines module
def get_full_package_name_for_class(clazz) -> str:
return ".".join([clazz.__module__, clazz.__name__])
SPIDER_MODULES = [spiders.__name__]
NEWSPIDER_MODULE = spiders.__name__
ITEM_PIPELINES = {
get_full_package_name_for_class(pipelines.YourScrapyPipeline): 300
}

How can I combine a simple project with scrapy project?

I have an example of a scrapy project. it is pretty much default. its folder structure:
craiglist_sample/
├── craiglist_sample
│ ├── __init__.py
│ ├── items.py
│ ├── pipelines.py
│ ├── settings.py
│ └── spiders
│ ├── __init__.py
│ ├── test.py
└── scrapy.cfg
When you write scrapy crawl craigs -o items.csv -t csv to windows command prompt it writes craiglist items and links to console.
I want to create an example.py in main folder and print these items to python console inside it.
I tried
from scrapy import cmdline
cmdline.execute("scrapy crawl craigs".split())
but it writes the same as windows shell output. How can I make it print only items and list?
test.py
:
from scrapy.contrib.spiders import CrawlSpider, Rule
from scrapy.contrib.linkextractors.sgml import SgmlLinkExtractor
from scrapy.selector import HtmlXPathSelector
from craiglist_sample.items import CraiglistSampleItem
class MySpider(CrawlSpider):
name = "craigs"
## allowed_domains = ["sfbay.craigslist.org"]
## start_urls = ["http://sfbay.craigslist.org/npo/"]
allowed_domains = ["craigslist.org"]
start_urls = ["http://sfbay.tr.craigslist.org/search/npo?"]
##search\/npo\?s=
rules = (Rule (SgmlLinkExtractor(allow=('s=\d00',),restrict_xpaths=('//a[#class="button next"]',))
, callback="parse_items", follow= True),
)
def parse_items(self, response):
hxs = HtmlXPathSelector(response)
titles = hxs.select('//span[#class="pl"]')
## titles = hxs.select("//p[#class='row']")
items = []
for titles in titles:
item = CraiglistSampleItem()
item ["title"] = titles.select("a/text()").extract()
item ["link"] = titles.select("a/#href").extract()
items.append(item)
return(items)

An approach could be turning off the default shell output of scrapy and insert a print command inside your parse_items function.
1 - Turn off the debug level in file settings.py
LOG_ENABLED = False
Documentation about logging levels in Scrapy here: http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/topics/logging.html
2 - Add a print command for the items you are interested
for titles in titles:
item = CraiglistSampleItem()
item ["title"] = titles.select("a/text()").extract()
item ["link"] = titles.select("a/#href").extract()
items.append(item)
print item ["title"], item ["link"]
The shell output will be:
[u'EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT'] [u'/eby/npo/4848086929.html']
[u'Direct Support Professional'] [u'/eby/npo/4848043371.html']
[u'Vocational Counselor'] [u'/eby/npo/4848042572.html']
[u'Day Program Supervisor'] [u'/eby/npo/4848041846.html']
[u'Educational Specialist'] [u'/eby/npo/4848040348.html']
[u'ORGANIZE WITH GREENPEACE - Grassroots Nonprofit Job!']
[u'/eby/npo/4847984654.html']
EDIT Code for executing from a script
import os
os.system('scrapy crawl craigs > log.txt')
There are several other ways for executing line program within python.
Check Executing command line programs from within python and Calling an external command in Python

Unable to load apache server while loading external modules in a class

This is my django project hierarchy
project/
apache/ django.wsgi
project/ __init__.py, settings.py, urls.py ..
pages/
__init__.py
widgets.py
website_views.py
services/
__init__.py
apis/
__init__.py
fparser.py
googleData.py
wp.py
...
wservice.py
...
So, the wservice.py is wrap-up like class which lies over all classes of apis module. It even provides some common functionality all classes that it inherit.
wservice.py
import feedparser
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
class WidgetService(FParser):
def post_content_summary(self, post_number):
....
content_text = content_soup.get_text()
...
def get_random_image(self, post_number):
...
content_soup = BeautifulSoup(html_content)
...
FParser class is located at fparser.py
The methods in fparser.py use the above class in this way.
from services.wservice import WidgetService
def method1():
obj = WidgetService()
m1 = obj.foo1() # described in FParser class
m2 = obj.foo2() # described in WidgetService class
I am using this WidgetService() in pages/widgets.py. So, what I found is, when ever I start using BeautifulSoup, the apache server is not loading.. Its not even showing any syntax error.
I don't even see any error in log file.
What might have possibly went wrong??? The interesting part is, I haven't faced this kind of error in development server, heroku (gunicorn)

This may be the interaction between Cython and mod_wsgi described here, and explored in a Beautiful Soup context here. Here's an earlier question similar to yours.