AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'Spider'

Question

I just started to learn scrapy. So I followed the scrapy documentation. I just written the first spider mentioned in that site.

import scrapy

class DmozSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    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]
        with open(filename, 'wb') as f:
            f.write(response.body)

Upon running this scrapy crawl dmoz command on project's root directory, it shows the below error.

2015-06-07 21:53:06+0530 [scrapy] INFO: Scrapy 0.14.4 started (bot: tutorial)
2015-06-07 21:53:06+0530 [scrapy] DEBUG: Enabled extensions: LogStats, TelnetConsole, CloseSpider, WebService, CoreStats, MemoryUsage, SpiderState
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/scrapy", line 4, in <module>
    execute()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/scrapy/cmdline.py", line 132, in execute
    _run_print_help(parser, _run_command, cmd, args, opts)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/scrapy/cmdline.py", line 97, in _run_print_help
    func(*a, **kw)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/scrapy/cmdline.py", line 139, in _run_command
    cmd.run(args, opts)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/scrapy/commands/crawl.py", line 43, in run
    spider = self.crawler.spiders.create(spname, **opts.spargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/scrapy/command.py", line 34, in crawler
    self._crawler.configure()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/scrapy/crawler.py", line 36, in configure
    self.spiders = spman_cls.from_crawler(self)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/scrapy/spidermanager.py", line 37, in from_crawler
    return cls.from_settings(crawler.settings)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/scrapy/spidermanager.py", line 33, in from_settings
    return cls(settings.getlist('SPIDER_MODULES'))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/scrapy/spidermanager.py", line 23, in __init__
    for module in walk_modules(name):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/scrapy/utils/misc.py", line 65, in walk_modules
    submod = __import__(fullpath, {}, {}, [''])
  File "/home/avinash/tutorial/tutorial/spiders/dmoz_spider.py", line 3, in <module>
    class DmozSpider(scrapy.Spider):
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'Spider'

Answer 1

You are using old Scrapy (0.14.4) with the most latest documentation.

Solution: upgrade to the latest version of Scrapy or read old docs, that suit currently installed version

Answer 2

Maybe try:

from scrapy import Spider

Just importing module isn't enough if you want to use it's classes

Answer 3

Use sudo pip install scrapy. If you get Python.h missing error, then install the python header files with sudo apt-get install python-dev (reference)

Answer 4

In my case the error message was little bit different

AttributeError: partially initialized module 'scrapy' has no attribute 'Spider' (most likely due to a circular import)

And it was due to the name of my script file (scrapy.py). Please make sure that you don't have another file called scrapy.py in the directory you are running because it will be imported before the real scrapy module.