Scrapy 2.2 documentation

Scrapy is a fast high-level web crawling and web scraping framework, used to crawl websites and extract structured data from their pages. It can be used for a wide range of purposes, from data mining to monitoring and automated testing.

Getting help

Having trouble? We’d like to help!

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 your browser’s Developer Tools for scraping

Learn how to scrape with your browser’s developer tools.

Selecting dynamically-loaded content

Read webpage data that is loaded dynamically.

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.

Coroutines

Use the coroutine syntax.

asyncio

Use asyncio and asyncio-powered libraries.

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.