Django and Scrapy

I'm currently working on a project which centres around pulling in data from an external website, "mashing" it up with some additional content, and then displaying it on a website.

The website is going to be interactive and reasonably complex so I decided to use django. To acquire the external data there isn't a webservice so I'm stuck parsing html (and excel spreadsheets but that's a separate story). Scrapy seemed ideal for this and although I wish I had used some other approach than xpath it largely has been.

Having set up my database models in django and built my spider in scrapy the next step was putting the data from the spider in the database. There are plenty of posts detailing how to use the django ORM from outside a django project, even some specific to scrapy but they didn't seem to be working for me.

The issue was the way I handled development and production environment settings.

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