How to deploy a Scrapy spider on Heroku cloud

Question

I developed few spiders in scrapy & I want to test those on Heroku cloud. Does anybody have any idea about how to deploy a Scrapy spider on Heroku cloud?

Answer 1

Yes, it's fairly simple to deploy and run your Scrapy spider on Heroku.

Here are the steps using a real Scrapy project as example:

1. Clone the project (note that it must have a requirements.txt file for Heroku to recognize it as a Python project):

   git clone https://github.com/scrapinghub/testspiders.git

2. Add cffi to the requirement.txt file (e.g. cffi==1.1.0).

3. Create the Heroku application (this will add a new heroku git remote):

   heroku create

4. Deploy the project (this will take a while the first time, when the slug is built):

   git push heroku master

5. Run your spider:

   heroku run scrapy crawl followall

Some notes:

• Heroku disk is ephemeral. If you want to store the scraped data in a persistent place, you can use a S3 feed export (by appending -o s3://mybucket/items.jl) or use an addon (like MongoHQ or Redis To Go) and write a pipeline to store your items there
• It would be cool to run a Scrapyd server on Heroku, but it's not currently possible because the sqlite3 module (which Scrapyd requires) doesn't work on Heroku
• If you want a more sophisticated solution for deploying your Scrapy spiders, consider setting up your own Scrapyd server or using a hosted service like Scrapy Cloud