Initiating a scrapy crawl as a Django management command - django

Question

I’ve got a project that connects Django and Scrapy where I’m looking to initiate a spider crawl through a Django management command. The idea is to run it periodically via cron. I’m using Django 1.11, Python 3.5 and Scrapy 1.5
Here's the code for my custom management command in the ‘~/djangoscrapy/src/app/management/commands/run_sp.py’ file
from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand
from scrapy.cmdline import execute
import os
from django.conf import settings
os.chdir(settings.CRAWLER_PATH)
class Command(BaseCommand):
def run_from_argv(self, argv):
print ('In run_from_argv')
self._argv = argv[:]
return self.execute()
def handle(self, *args, **options):
execute(self._argv[1:])
When I run $python manage.py run_sp crawl usc
I get this error….
In run_from_argv
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "manage.py", line 10, in <module>
execute_from_command_line(sys.argv)
File "/home/greendot/lib/python2.7/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 367, in execute_from_command_line
utility.execute()
File "/home/greendot/lib/python2.7/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 359, in execute
self.fetch_command(subcommand).run_from_argv(self.argv)
File "/home/greendot/webapps/scraper3/src/app/management/commands/run_sp.py", line 15, in run_from_argv
return self.execute()
File "/home/greendot/lib/python2.7/django/core/management/base.py", line 314, in execute
if options['no_color']:
KeyError: u'no_color'
My project structure is as follows
SRC
├── app
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── admin.py
│   ├── management
│   │   └── commands
│   │   ├── __init__.py
│   │   ├── run_sp.py
│   ├── models.py
│   └── views.py
├── example_bot
│   ├── dbs
│   ├── example_bot
│   │   ├── __init__.py
│   │   ├── items.py
│   │   ├── middlewares.py
│   │   ├── pipelines.py
│   │   ├── settings.py
│   │   └── spiders
│   │   ├── __init__.py
│   │   ├── __pycache__
│   │   └── usc.py
│   └── scrapy.cfg
├── example_project
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── __pycache__
│   ├── settings.py
│   ├── urls.py
│   └── wsgi.py
├── manage.py
I've added the line below to my Django settings file so that when the management command executes, it is in the 'example_bot' directory since the 'scrapy crawl' command is only available within the scrapy project directory, and not in the BASE_DIR.
CRAWLER_PATH = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'example_bot/')
I can't seem to get this to work though so any help is much appreciated