How to save the data from a scrapy crawler into a variable?

This is not so easy because Scrapy is non-blocking and works in an event loop; it uses Twisted event loop, and Twisted event loop is not restartable, so you can’t write crawler.start(); data = crawler.data – after crawler.start() process runs forever, calling registered callbacks until it is killed or ended.

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If you use an event loop in your app (e.g. you have a Twisted or Tornado web server) then it is possible to get the data from a crawl without storing it to disk. The idea is to listen to item_scraped signal. I’m using the following helper to make it nicer:

import collections

from twisted.internet.defer import Deferred
from scrapy.crawler import Crawler
from scrapy import signals

def scrape_items(crawler_runner, crawler_or_spidercls, *args, **kwargs):
    """
    Start a crawl and return an object (ItemCursor instance)
    which allows to retrieve scraped items and wait for items
    to become available.

    Example:

    .. code-block:: python

        @inlineCallbacks
        def f():
            runner = CrawlerRunner()
            async_items = scrape_items(runner, my_spider)
            while (yield async_items.fetch_next):
                item = async_items.next_item()
                # ...
            # ...

    This convoluted way to write a loop should become unnecessary
    in Python 3.5 because of ``async for``.
    """
    crawler = crawler_runner.create_crawler(crawler_or_spidercls)    
    d = crawler_runner.crawl(crawler, *args, **kwargs)
    return ItemCursor(d, crawler)


class ItemCursor(object):
    def __init__(self, crawl_d, crawler):
        self.crawl_d = crawl_d
        self.crawler = crawler

        crawler.signals.connect(self._on_item_scraped, signals.item_scraped)

        crawl_d.addCallback(self._on_finished)
        crawl_d.addErrback(self._on_error)

        self.closed = False
        self._items_available = Deferred()
        self._items = collections.deque()

    def _on_item_scraped(self, item):
        self._items.append(item)
        self._items_available.callback(True)
        self._items_available = Deferred()

    def _on_finished(self, result):
        self.closed = True
        self._items_available.callback(False)

    def _on_error(self, failure):
        self.closed = True
        self._items_available.errback(failure)

    @property
    def fetch_next(self):
        """
        A Deferred used with ``inlineCallbacks`` or ``gen.coroutine`` to
        asynchronously retrieve the next item, waiting for an item to be
        crawled if necessary. Resolves to ``False`` if the crawl is finished,
        otherwise :meth:`next_item` is guaranteed to return an item
        (a dict or a scrapy.Item instance).
        """
        if self.closed:
            # crawl is finished
            d = Deferred()
            d.callback(False)
            return d

        if self._items:
            # result is ready
            d = Deferred()
            d.callback(True)
            return d

        # We're active, but item is not ready yet. Return a Deferred which
        # resolves to True if item is scraped or to False if crawl is stopped.
        return self._items_available

    def next_item(self):
        """Get a document from the most recently fetched batch, or ``None``.
        See :attr:`fetch_next`.
        """
        if not self._items:
            return None
        return self._items.popleft()

The API is inspired by motor, a MongoDB driver for async frameworks. Using scrape_items you can get items from twisted or tornado callbacks as soon as they are scraped, in a way similar to how you fetch items from a MongoDB query.