Error while using Scrapy : ['scrapy.telnet.TelnetConsole': No module named conch twisted]

Question

In Ubuntu 13.04, I have installed Scrapy for python-2.7, from the tarball. Executing a crawl command results in the below error:

ImportError: Error loading object 'scrapy.telnet.TelnetConsole': No module named conch

I've also tried installing twisted conch using easy_install and using the tarball. I have also removed the scrappy.egg and .info and the main scrappy folder from the python path.

Reinstalling scrapy does not help as well.

Can some one point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

On Ubuntu, you should avoid using easy_install wherever you can. Instead, you should be using apt-get, aptitude, "Ubuntu Software Center", or another of the distribution-provided tools.

For example, this single command is all you need to install scrapy - along with every one of its dependencies that is not already installed:

$ sudo apt-get install python-scrapy

easy_install is not nearly as good at installing things as apt-get. Chances are the reason you can't get it to work is that it didn't quite install things sensibly, particularly with respect to what was already installed on the system. Sadly, it also leaves no record of what it did, so uninstallation is difficult or impossible. You may now have a big mess on your system that prevents proper installations from working as well (or maybe not, you might be lucky). It's difficult to say whether this is the case, since there are a lot of different pieces that go into a working system, and they all need to fit together just right, and it's difficult to enumerate them so you can check them, let alone enumerate the ways they can each be broken.