ArachneServer

ArachneServer provides a wrapper around your scrapy Spider object to run them through a flask app. All you have to do is customize SPIDER_SETTINGS in the settings file.

Installation

You can install ArachneServer from pip

pip install ArachneServer

Sample settings

This is sample settings file for spiders in your project. The settings file should be called settings.py in the root of your project for ArachneServer to find it and looks like this::

# settings.py file
SPIDER_SETTINGS = [
	{
		'endpoint': 'dmoz',
		'location': 'spiders.DmozSpider',
		'endpoints_location: 'spiders.DmozSpider_endpoints'
		'spider': 'DmozSpider'    
	}
]

Usage

It looks very similar to a flask app but since Scrapy depends on the python twisted package, we need to run our flask app with twisted::

from twisted.web.wsgi import WSGIResource
from twisted.web.server import Site
from twisted.internet import reactor
from arachneserver import ArachneServer

app = ArachneServer(__name__)

resource = WSGIResource(reactor, reactor.getThreadPool(), app)
site = Site(resource)
reactor.listenTCP(8080, site)

if __name__ == '__main__':
	reactor.run()

Endpoints

Two default endpoints are provided for every spider:

1. '/' - List all spiders.
2. '/run-spider/<spider_name>' - To run the specified spider.

Specify additional endpoints for each spider and update the respective SPIDER_SETTINGS dictionary's endpoints_location to point to the correct path to the endpoints file.