Scrapy 1.4 documentation

This documentation contains everything you need to know about Scrapy.

Getting help

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First steps

Scrapy at a glance
Understand what Scrapy is and how it can help you.
Installation guide
Get Scrapy installed on your computer.
Scrapy Tutorial
Write your first Scrapy project.
Examples
Learn more by playing with a pre-made Scrapy project.

Basic concepts

Command line tool
Learn about the command-line tool used to manage your Scrapy project.
Spiders
Write the rules to crawl your websites.
Selectors
Extract the data from web pages using XPath.
Scrapy shell
Test your extraction code in an interactive environment.
Items
Define the data you want to scrape.
Item Loaders
Populate your items with the extracted data.
Item Pipeline
Post-process and store your scraped data.
Feed exports
Output your scraped data using different formats and storages.
Requests and Responses
Understand the classes used to represent HTTP requests and responses.
Link Extractors
Convenient classes to extract links to follow from pages.
Settings
Learn how to configure Scrapy and see all available settings.
Exceptions
See all available exceptions and their meaning.

Built-in services

Logging
Learn how to use Python’s builtin logging on Scrapy.
Stats Collection
Collect statistics about your scraping crawler.
Sending e-mail
Send email notifications when certain events occur.
Telnet Console
Inspect a running crawler using a built-in Python console.
Web Service
Monitor and control a crawler using a web service.

Solving specific problems

Frequently Asked Questions
Get answers to most frequently asked questions.
Debugging Spiders
Learn how to debug common problems of your scrapy spider.
Spiders Contracts
Learn how to use contracts for testing your spiders.
Common Practices
Get familiar with some Scrapy common practices.
Broad Crawls
Tune Scrapy for crawling a lot domains in parallel.
Using Firefox for scraping
Learn how to scrape with Firefox and some useful add-ons.
Using Firebug for scraping
Learn how to scrape efficiently using Firebug.
Debugging memory leaks
Learn how to find and get rid of memory leaks in your crawler.
Downloading and processing files and images
Download files and/or images associated with your scraped items.
Deploying Spiders
Deploying your Scrapy spiders and run them in a remote server.
AutoThrottle extension
Adjust crawl rate dynamically based on load.
Benchmarking
Check how Scrapy performs on your hardware.
Jobs: pausing and resuming crawls
Learn how to pause and resume crawls for large spiders.

Extending Scrapy

Architecture overview
Understand the Scrapy architecture.
Downloader Middleware
Customize how pages get requested and downloaded.
Spider Middleware
Customize the input and output of your spiders.
Extensions
Extend Scrapy with your custom functionality
Core API
Use it on extensions and middlewares to extend Scrapy functionality
Signals
See all available signals and how to work with them.
Item Exporters
Quickly export your scraped items to a file (XML, CSV, etc).

All the rest

Release notes
See what has changed in recent Scrapy versions.
Contributing to Scrapy
Learn how to contribute to the Scrapy project.
Versioning and API Stability
Understand Scrapy versioning and API stability.