# Jobs: pausing and resuming crawls

Sometimes, for big sites, it’s desirable to pause crawls and be able to resume them later.

Scrapy supports this functionality out of the box by providing the following facilities:

- a scheduler that persists scheduled requests on disk

- a duplicates filter that persists visited requests on disk

- an extension that keeps some spider state (key/value pairs) persistent between batches

## Job directory

To enable persistence support, define a job directory through the `JOBDIR` setting.

The job directory will store all required data to keep the state of a single job (i.e. a spider run), so that if stopped cleanly, it can be resumed later.

Warning

This directory must not be shared by different spiders, or even different jobs of the same spider.

Warning

Treat the job directory with the same security care as your Scrapy project source code. Do not point `JOBDIR` to a path that untrusted parties can write to.

See also Job directory contents.

## How to use it

To start a spider with persistence support enabled, run it like this:

    scrapy crawl somespider -s JOBDIR=crawls/somespider-1

Then, you can stop the spider safely at any time (by pressing Ctrl-C or sending a signal), and resume it later by issuing the same command:

    scrapy crawl somespider -s JOBDIR=crawls/somespider-1

## Keeping persistent state between batches

Sometimes you’ll want to keep some persistent spider state between pause/resume batches. You can use the `spider.state` attribute for that, which should be a dict. There’s a built-in extension that takes care of serializing, storing and loading that attribute from the job directory, when the spider starts and stops.

Here’s an example of a callback that uses the spider state (other spider code is omitted for brevity):

    def parse_item(self, response):
        # parse item here
        self.state["items_count"] = self.state.get("items_count", 0) + 1

## Persistence gotchas

There are a few things to keep in mind if you want to be able to use the Scrapy persistence support:

### Pause limitations

Job pausing and resuming is only supported when the spider is paused by stopping it cleanly. Forced, sudden or otherwise unclean shutdown can lead to data corruption in the job directory, which may prevent the spider from resuming correctly.

### Cookies expiration

Cookies may expire. So, if you don’t resume your spider quickly the requests scheduled may no longer work. This won’t be an issue if your spider doesn’t rely on cookies.

### Request serialization

For persistence to work, `Request` objects must be serializable with `pickle`, except for the `callback` and `errback` values passed to their `__init__` method, which must be methods of the running `Spider` class.

If you wish to log the requests that couldn’t be serialized, you can set the `SCHEDULER_DEBUG` setting to `True` in the project’s settings page. It is `False` by default.

Note

Because requests are serialized with `pickle`, the objects you store on a request, such as the values of its `cb_kwargs` and `meta` dictionaries, are deep-copied when the request is written to and later read back from the job directory. As a result, the callback receives a copy of those objects rather than the original ones, and changes made to the copy are not reflected in the original object. Keep this in mind if you rely on sharing mutable state through `cb_kwargs` or `meta`.

## Job directory contents

The contents of a job directory depend on the components used during the job. Components known to write in the job directory include the scheduler and the `SpiderState` extension. See the reference documentation of the corresponding components for details.

For example, with default settings, the job directory may look like this:

    ├── requests.queue
    |   ├── active.json
    |   └── {hostname}-{hash}
    |       └── {priority}{s?}
    |           ├── q{00000}
    |           └── info.json
    ├── requests.seen
    └── spider.state

Where:

- `Scheduler` creates the `requests.queue/` directory and the `active.json` file, the latter containing the state data returned by `DownloaderAwarePriorityQueue.close()` the last time the job was paused.

- `DownloaderAwarePriorityQueue` creates the `{hostname}-{hash}` directories.

- `ScrapyPriorityQueue` creates the `{priority}{s?}` directories.

- `scrapy.squeues.PickleLifoDiskQueue`, a subclass of `queuelib.LifoDiskQueue` that uses `pickle` to serialize `dict` representations of `scrapy.Request` objects, creates the `info.json` and `q{00000}` files.

- `RFPDupeFilter` creates the `requests.seen` file.

- `SpiderState` creates the `spider.state` file.