Scrapy: Python cannot find the spider

Question

I'm trying to follow the Scrapy tutorial, but I'm stuck in one of the first step. I think I have correctly created the spider:

class dmoz(BaseSpider):
    name = "dmoz"
    allowed_domains = ["dmoz.org"]
    start_urls = [
        "http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Books/",
        "http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Resources/"
    ]

def parse(self, response):
    filename = response.url.split("/")[-2]
    open(filename, 'wb').write(response.body)

I have saved that (as dmoz_spider.py) from the IDLE-shell typing the .py extension in a given folder, which corresponds with the directory of the terminal window.

However, when I type scrapy crawl dmoz I get this:

2013-08-09 19:18:06+0200 [scrapy] INFO: Scrapy 0.16.5 started (bot: dmoz)
2013-08-09 19:18:07+0200 [scrapy] DEBUG: Enabled extensions: LogStats, TelnetConsole, CloseSpider, WebService, CoreStats, SpiderState
2013-08-09 19:18:08+0200 [scrapy] DEBUG: Enabled downloader middlewares: HttpAuthMiddleware, DownloadTimeoutMiddleware, UserAgentMiddleware, RetryMiddleware, DefaultHeadersMiddleware, RedirectMiddleware, CookiesMiddleware, HttpCompressionMiddleware, ChunkedTransferMiddleware, DownloaderStats
2013-08-09 19:18:08+0200 [scrapy] DEBUG: Enabled spider middlewares: HttpErrorMiddleware, OffsiteMiddleware, RefererMiddleware, UrlLengthMiddleware, DepthMiddleware
2013-08-09 19:18:08+0200 [scrapy] DEBUG: Enabled item pipelines: 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/scrapy", line 5, in <module>
    pkg_resources.run_script('Scrapy==0.16.5', 'scrapy')
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pkg_resources.py", line 499, in run_script
    self.require(requires)[0].run_script(script_name, ns)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pkg_resources.py", line 1235, in run_script
    execfile(script_filename, namespace, namespace)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Scrapy-0.16.5-py2.7.egg/EGG-INFO/scripts/scrapy", line 4, in <module>
    execute()
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Scrapy-0.16.5-py2.7.egg/scrapy/cmdline.py", line 131, in execute
    _run_print_help(parser, _run_command, cmd, args, opts)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Scrapy-0.16.5-py2.7.egg/scrapy/cmdline.py", line 76, in _run_print_help
    func(*a, **kw)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Scrapy-0.16.5-py2.7.egg/scrapy/cmdline.py", line 138, in _run_command
    cmd.run(args, opts)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Scrapy-0.16.5-py2.7.egg/scrapy/commands/crawl.py", line 43, in run
    spider = self.crawler.spiders.create(spname, **opts.spargs)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/Scrapy-0.16.5-py2.7.egg/scrapy/spidermanager.py", line 43, in create
    raise KeyError("Spider not found: %s" % spider_name)
KeyError: 'Spider not found: dmoz'

I cannot understand what is wrong, but given that I'm quite new to programming, it might be a very easy thing.

Answer 1

Are you running in a Virtualenv? If so, please do a pip freeze and show us if you have all the scrapy dependencies installed

The code is fine, I just copy-pasted you code and ran it with no problem. Also, you should be able to run the spider from anywhere in your scrapy project folders.

Answer 2

You need to be in the directory that contains scrapy.cfg:

stav@maia:/srv/scrapy/tutorial$ ls
scrapy.cfg  tutorial/

Here is a tree listing of the files in the project on my system:

stav@maia:/srv/scrapy/tutorial$ tree
.
├── scrapy.cfg
└── tutorial
    ├── __init__.py
    ├── items.py
    ├── pipelines.py
    ├── settings.py
    └── spiders
        ├── dmoz_spider.py
        └── __init__.py

2 directories, 13 files

You should show us the entire command line that you use to execute the command, including the working directory:

stav@maia:/srv/scrapy/tutorial$ scrapy crawl dmoz
2013-08-11 11:00:23-0500 [scrapy] INFO: Scrapy 0.17.0 started (bot: tutorial)
2013-08-11 11:00:23-0500 [scrapy] DEBUG: Optional features available: ssl, django, http11, boto, libxml2
2013-08-11 11:00:23-0500 [scrapy] DEBUG: Overridden settings: {'NEWSPIDER_MODULE': 'tutorial.spiders', 'SPIDER_MODULES': ['tutorial.spiders'], 'USER_AGENT': 'tutorial/1.0', 'BOT_NAME': 'tutorial'}
2013-08-11 11:00:23-0500 [scrapy] DEBUG: Enabled extensions: LogStats, TelnetConsole, CloseSpider, WebService, CoreStats, SpiderState
2013-08-11 11:00:23-0500 [scrapy] DEBUG: Enabled downloader middlewares: HttpAuthMiddleware, DownloadTimeoutMiddleware, UserAgentMiddleware, RetryMiddleware, DefaultHeadersMiddleware, MetaRefreshMiddleware, HttpCompressionMiddleware, RedirectMiddleware, CookiesMiddleware, ChunkedTransferMiddleware, DownloaderStats
2013-08-11 11:00:23-0500 [scrapy] DEBUG: Enabled spider middlewares: HttpErrorMiddleware, OffsiteMiddleware, RefererMiddleware, UrlLengthMiddleware, DepthMiddleware
2013-08-11 11:00:23-0500 [scrapy] DEBUG: Enabled item pipelines:
2013-08-11 11:00:23-0500 [dmoz] INFO: Spider opened
2013-08-11 11:00:23-0500 [dmoz] INFO: Crawled 0 pages (at 0 pages/min), scraped 0 items (at 0 items/min)
2013-08-11 11:00:23-0500 [scrapy] DEBUG: Telnet console listening on 0.0.0.0:6023
2013-08-11 11:00:23-0500 [scrapy] DEBUG: Web service listening on 0.0.0.0:6080
2013-08-11 11:00:24-0500 [dmoz] DEBUG: Crawled (200) <GET http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Books/> (referer: None)
2013-08-11 11:00:24-0500 [dmoz] DEBUG: Crawled (200) <GET http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Resources/> (referer: None)
2013-08-11 11:00:24-0500 [dmoz] INFO: Closing spider (finished)
2013-08-11 11:00:24-0500 [dmoz] INFO: Dumping Scrapy stats:
    {'downloader/request_bytes': 486,
     'downloader/request_count': 2,
     'downloader/request_method_count/GET': 2,
     'downloader/response_bytes': 12980,
     'downloader/response_count': 2,
     'downloader/response_status_count/200': 2,
     'finish_reason': 'finished',
     'finish_time': datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 11, 16, 0, 24, 101947),
     'log_count/DEBUG': 10,
     'log_count/INFO': 4,
     'response_received_count': 2,
     'scheduler/dequeued': 2,
     'scheduler/dequeued/memory': 2,
     'scheduler/enqueued': 2,
     'scheduler/enqueued/memory': 2,
     'start_time': datetime.datetime(2013, 8, 11, 16, 0, 23, 408890)}
2013-08-11 11:00:24-0500 [dmoz] INFO: Spider closed (finished)

Answer 3

If the above solutions do not work then ::

open the settings.pyin the tutorial folder and make the following changes

BOT_NAME = 'dmoz'

Change the name of BOT_NAME from 'tutorial' with the one you have defined explicitly in your dmoz_spider.py file.

Answer 4

Please make sure dmoz_spider.py is in sub directory 'spiders'

mv dmoz_spider.py spiders/.