This is Windows 7 with python 2.7
I have a scrapy project in a directory called caps (this is where scrapy.cfg is)
My spider is located in caps\\caps\\spiders\\c
make sure that your spider file is saved in your spider directory. the Crawler looks for the spider name in the spider directory
In my case, i set 'LOG_STDOUT=True', and scrapyd can not return the results to json response when you are looking for your spiders with '/listspiders.json'. And instead of that, the results are being printed to the log files you set at scrapyd's default_scrapyd.conf file. So, I changed the settings as this, and it worked well.
LOG_STDOUT = False
If you are following the tutorial from https://docs.scrapy.org/en/latest/intro/tutorial.html
Then do something like:
$ sudo apt install python-pip
$ pip install Scrapy
(logout, login)
$ cd
$ scrapy startproject tutorial
$ vi ~/tutorial/tutorial/spiders/quotes_spider.py
$ cd ~/tutorial/tutorial
$ scrapy crawl quotes
The error happens if you try to create the spiders directory yourself under ~/tutorial