title: Crawling local files with Scrapy without an active project?
body: <p>Is it possible to crawl local files with Scrapy 0.18.4 without having an active project? I've seen <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19385837/python-scrapy-on-offline-local-data">this</a> answer and it looks promising, but to use the <code>crawl</code> command you need a project.</p>
  
  <p>Alternatively, is there an easy/minimalist way to set up a project for an existing spider? I have my spider, pipelines, middleware, and items defined in one Python file. I've created a scrapy.cfg file with only the project name. This lets me use <code>crawl</code>, but since I don't have a spiders folder Scrapy can't find my spider. Can I point Scrapy to the right directory, or do I need to split my items, spider, etc. up into separate files?</p>
  
  <p>[edit] I forgot to say that I'm running the spider using <code>Crawler.crawl(my_spider)</code> - ideally I'd still like to be able to run the spider like that, but can run it in a subprocess from my script if that's not possible.</p>
  
  <p>Turns out the suggestion in the answer I linked does work - <a href="http://localhost:8000" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://localhost:8000</a> can be used as a start_url, so there's no need for a project.</p>