Scrapy 1.x release notes

Scrapy 1.8.4 (2024-02-14)

Security bug fixes:

Scrapy 1.8.3 (2022-07-25)

Security bug fix:

  • When HttpProxyMiddleware processes a request with proxy metadata, and that proxy metadata includes proxy credentials, HttpProxyMiddleware sets the Proxy-Authorization header, but only if that header is not already set.

    There are third-party proxy-rotation downloader middlewares that set different proxy metadata every time they process a request.

    Because of request retries and redirects, the same request can be processed by downloader middlewares more than once, including both HttpProxyMiddleware and any third-party proxy-rotation downloader middleware.

    These third-party proxy-rotation downloader middlewares could change the proxy metadata of a request to a new value, but fail to remove the Proxy-Authorization header from the previous value of the proxy metadata, causing the credentials of one proxy to be sent to a different proxy.

    To prevent the unintended leaking of proxy credentials, the behavior of HttpProxyMiddleware is now as follows when processing a request:

    • If the request being processed defines proxy metadata that includes credentials, the Proxy-Authorization header is always updated to feature those credentials.

    • If the request being processed defines proxy metadata without credentials, the Proxy-Authorization header is removed unless it was originally defined for the same proxy URL.

      To remove proxy credentials while keeping the same proxy URL, remove the Proxy-Authorization header.

    • If the request has no proxy metadata, or that metadata is a falsy value (e.g. None), the Proxy-Authorization header is removed.

      It is no longer possible to set a proxy URL through the proxy metadata but set the credentials through the Proxy-Authorization header. Set proxy credentials through the proxy metadata instead.

Scrapy 1.8.2 (2022-03-01)

Security bug fixes:

  • When a Request object with cookies defined gets a redirect response causing a new Request object to be scheduled, the cookies defined in the original Request object are no longer copied into the new Request object.

    If you manually set the Cookie header on a Request object and the domain name of the redirect URL is not an exact match for the domain of the URL of the original Request object, your Cookie header is now dropped from the new Request object.

    The old behavior could be exploited by an attacker to gain access to your cookies. Please, see the cjvr-mfj7-j4j8 security advisory for more information.

    Note

    It is still possible to enable the sharing of cookies between different domains with a shared domain suffix (e.g. example.com and any subdomain) by defining the shared domain suffix (e.g. example.com) as the cookie domain when defining your cookies. See the documentation of the Request class for more information.

  • When the domain of a cookie, either received in the Set-Cookie header of a response or defined in a Request object, is set to a public suffix, the cookie is now ignored unless the cookie domain is the same as the request domain.

    The old behavior could be exploited by an attacker to inject cookies into your requests to some other domains. Please, see the mfjm-vh54-3f96 security advisory for more information.

Scrapy 1.8.1 (2021-10-05)

  • Security bug fix:

    If you use HttpAuthMiddleware (i.e. the http_user and http_pass spider attributes) for HTTP authentication, any request exposes your credentials to the request target.

    To prevent unintended exposure of authentication credentials to unintended domains, you must now additionally set a new, additional spider attribute, http_auth_domain, and point it to the specific domain to which the authentication credentials must be sent.

    If the http_auth_domain spider attribute is not set, the domain of the first request will be considered the HTTP authentication target, and authentication credentials will only be sent in requests targeting that domain.

    If you need to send the same HTTP authentication credentials to multiple domains, you can use w3lib.http.basic_auth_header() instead to set the value of the Authorization header of your requests.

    If you really want your spider to send the same HTTP authentication credentials to any domain, set the http_auth_domain spider attribute to None.

    Finally, if you are a user of scrapy-splash, know that this version of Scrapy breaks compatibility with scrapy-splash 0.7.2 and earlier. You will need to upgrade scrapy-splash to a greater version for it to continue to work.

Scrapy 1.8.0 (2019-10-28)

Highlights:

Backward-incompatible changes

  • Python 3.4 is no longer supported, and some of the minimum requirements of Scrapy have also changed:

    (#3892)

  • JSONRequest is now called JsonRequest for consistency with similar classes (#3929, #3982)

  • If you are using a custom context factory (DOWNLOADER_CLIENTCONTEXTFACTORY), its __init__ method must accept two new parameters: tls_verbose_logging and tls_ciphers (#2111, #3392, #3442, #3450)

  • ItemLoader now turns the values of its input item into lists:

    >>> item = MyItem()
>>> item["field"] = "value1"
>>> loader = ItemLoader(item=item)
>>> item["field"]
['value1']

    This is needed to allow adding values to existing fields (loader.add_value('field', 'value2')).

    (#3804, #3819, #3897, #3976, #3998, #4036)

See also Deprecation removals below.

New features

Bug fixes

Documentation

Deprecation removals

  • scrapy.xlib has been removed (#4015)

Deprecations

  • The LevelDB storage backend (scrapy.extensions.httpcache.LeveldbCacheStorage) of HttpCacheMiddleware is deprecated (#4085, #4092)

  • Use of the undocumented SCRAPY_PICKLED_SETTINGS_TO_OVERRIDE environment variable is deprecated (#3910)

  • scrapy.item.DictItem is deprecated, use Item instead (#3999)

Other changes

  • Minimum versions of optional Scrapy requirements that are covered by continuous integration tests have been updated:

    Lower versions of these optional requirements may work, but it is not guaranteed (#3892)

  • GitHub templates for bug reports and feature requests (#3126, #3471, #3749, #3754)

  • Continuous integration fixes (#3923)

  • Code cleanup (#3391, #3907, #3946, #3950, #4023, #4031)

Scrapy 1.7.4 (2019-10-21)

Revert the fix for #3804 (#3819), which has a few undesired side effects (#3897, #3976).

As a result, when an item loader is initialized with an item, ItemLoader.load_item() once again makes later calls to ItemLoader.get_output_value() or ItemLoader.load_item() return empty data.

Scrapy 1.7.3 (2019-08-01)

Enforce lxml 4.3.5 or lower for Python 3.4 (#3912, #3918).

Scrapy 1.7.2 (2019-07-23)

Fix Python 2 support (#3889, #3893, #3896).

Scrapy 1.7.1 (2019-07-18)

Re-packaging of Scrapy 1.7.0, which was missing some changes in PyPI.

Scrapy 1.7.0 (2019-07-18)

Note

Make sure you install Scrapy 1.7.1. The Scrapy 1.7.0 package in PyPI is the result of an erroneous commit tagging and does not include all the changes described below.

Highlights:

  • Improvements for crawls targeting multiple domains

  • A cleaner way to pass arguments to callbacks

  • A new class for JSON requests

  • Improvements for rule-based spiders

  • New features for feed exports

Backward-incompatible changes

  • 429 is now part of the RETRY_HTTP_CODES setting by default

    This change is backward incompatible. If you don’t want to retry 429, you must override RETRY_HTTP_CODES accordingly.

  • Crawler, CrawlerRunner.crawl and CrawlerRunner.create_crawler no longer accept a Spider subclass instance, they only accept a Spider subclass now.

    Spider subclass instances were never meant to work, and they were not working as one would expect: instead of using the passed Spider subclass instance, their from_crawler method was called to generate a new instance.

  • Non-default values for the SCHEDULER_PRIORITY_QUEUE setting may stop working. Scheduler priority queue classes now need to handle Request objects instead of arbitrary Python data structures.

  • An additional crawler parameter has been added to the __init__ method of the Scheduler class. Custom scheduler subclasses which don’t accept arbitrary parameters in their __init__ method might break because of this change.

    For more information, see SCHEDULER.

See also Deprecation removals below.

New features

Bug fixes

Documentation

Deprecation removals

The following deprecated APIs have been removed (#3578):

  • scrapy.conf (use Crawler.settings)

  • From scrapy.core.downloader.handlers:

    • http.HttpDownloadHandler (use http10.HTTP10DownloadHandler)

  • scrapy.loader.ItemLoader._get_values (use _get_xpathvalues)

  • scrapy.loader.XPathItemLoader (use ItemLoader)

  • scrapy.log (see Logging)

  • From scrapy.pipelines:

    • files.FilesPipeline.file_key (use file_path)

    • images.ImagesPipeline.file_key (use file_path)

    • images.ImagesPipeline.image_key (use file_path)

    • images.ImagesPipeline.thumb_key (use thumb_path)

  • From both scrapy.selector and scrapy.selector.lxmlsel:

  • From scrapy.selector.csstranslator:

  • From Selector:

    • _root (both the __init__ method argument and the object property, use root)

    • extract_unquoted (use getall)

    • select (use xpath)

  • From SelectorList:

    • extract_unquoted (use getall)

    • select (use xpath)

    • x (use xpath)

  • scrapy.spiders.BaseSpider (use Spider)

  • From Spider (and subclasses):

    • DOWNLOAD_DELAY (use download_delay)

    • set_crawler (use from_crawler())

  • scrapy.spiders.spiders (use SpiderLoader)

  • scrapy.telnet (use scrapy.extensions.telnet)

  • From scrapy.utils.python:

    • str_to_unicode (use to_unicode)

    • unicode_to_str (use to_bytes)

  • scrapy.utils.response.body_or_str

The following deprecated settings have also been removed (#3578):

Deprecations

  • The queuelib.PriorityQueue value for the SCHEDULER_PRIORITY_QUEUE setting is deprecated. Use scrapy.pqueues.ScrapyPriorityQueue instead.

  • process_request callbacks passed to Rule that do not accept two arguments are deprecated.

  • The following modules are deprecated:

  • The scrapy.utils.datatypes.MergeDict class is deprecated for Python 3 code bases. Use ChainMap instead. (#3878)

  • The scrapy.utils.gz.is_gzipped function is deprecated. Use scrapy.utils.gz.gzip_magic_number instead.

Other changes

Scrapy 1.6.0 (2019-01-30)

Highlights:

  • better Windows support;

  • Python 3.7 compatibility;

  • big documentation improvements, including a switch from .extract_first() + .extract() API to .get() + .getall() API;

  • feed exports, FilePipeline and MediaPipeline improvements;

  • better extensibility: item_error and request_reached_downloader signals; from_crawler support for feed exporters, feed storages and dupefilters.

  • scrapy.contracts fixes and new features;

  • telnet console security improvements, first released as a backport in Scrapy 1.5.2 (2019-01-22);

  • clean-up of the deprecated code;

  • various bug fixes, small new features and usability improvements across the codebase.

Selector API changes

While these are not changes in Scrapy itself, but rather in the parsel library which Scrapy uses for xpath/css selectors, these changes are worth mentioning here. Scrapy now depends on parsel >= 1.5, and Scrapy documentation is updated to follow recent parsel API conventions.

Most visible change is that .get() and .getall() selector methods are now preferred over .extract_first() and .extract(). We feel that these new methods result in a more concise and readable code. See extract() and extract_first() for more details.

Note

There are currently no plans to deprecate .extract() and .extract_first() methods.

Another useful new feature is the introduction of Selector.attrib and SelectorList.attrib properties, which make it easier to get attributes of HTML elements. See Selecting element attributes.

CSS selectors are cached in parsel >= 1.5, which makes them faster when the same CSS path is used many times. This is very common in case of Scrapy spiders: callbacks are usually called several times, on different pages.

If you’re using custom Selector or SelectorList subclasses, a backward incompatible change in parsel may affect your code. See parsel changelog for a detailed description, as well as for the full list of improvements.

Telnet console

Backward incompatible: Scrapy’s telnet console now requires username and password. See Telnet Console for more details. This change fixes a security issue; see Scrapy 1.5.2 (2019-01-22) release notes for details.

New extensibility features

  • from_crawler support is added to feed exporters and feed storages. This, among other things, allows to access Scrapy settings from custom feed storages and exporters (#1605, #3348).

  • from_crawler support is added to dupefilters (#2956); this allows to access e.g. settings or a spider from a dupefilter.

  • item_error is fired when an error happens in a pipeline (#3256);

  • request_reached_downloader is fired when Downloader gets a new Request; this signal can be useful e.g. for custom Schedulers (#3393).

  • new SitemapSpider sitemap_filter() method which allows to select sitemap entries based on their attributes in SitemapSpider subclasses (#3512).

  • Lazy loading of Downloader Handlers is now optional; this enables better initialization error handling in custom Downloader Handlers (#3394).

New FilePipeline and MediaPipeline features

scrapy.contracts improvements

  • Exceptions in contracts code are handled better (#3377);

  • dont_filter=True is used for contract requests, which allows to test different callbacks with the same URL (#3381);

  • request_cls attribute in Contract subclasses allow to use different Request classes in contracts, for example FormRequest (#3383).

  • Fixed errback handling in contracts, e.g. for cases where a contract is executed for URL which returns non-200 response (#3371).

Usability improvements

  • more stats for RobotsTxtMiddleware (#3100)

  • INFO log level is used to show telnet host/port (#3115)

  • a message is added to IgnoreRequest in RobotsTxtMiddleware (#3113)

  • better validation of url argument in Response.follow (#3131)

  • non-zero exit code is returned from Scrapy commands when error happens on spider initialization (#3226)

  • Link extraction improvements: “ftp” is added to scheme list (#3152); “flv” is added to common video extensions (#3165)

  • better error message when an exporter is disabled (#3358);

  • scrapy shell --help mentions syntax required for local files (./file.html) - #3496.

  • Referer header value is added to RFPDupeFilter log messages (#3588)

Bug fixes

  • fixed issue with extra blank lines in .csv exports under Windows (#3039);

  • proper handling of pickling errors in Python 3 when serializing objects for disk queues (#3082)

  • flags are now preserved when copying Requests (#3342);

  • FormRequest.from_response clickdata shouldn’t ignore elements with input[type=image] (#3153).

  • FormRequest.from_response should preserve duplicate keys (#3247)

Documentation improvements

Deprecation removals

Compatibility shims for pre-1.0 Scrapy module names are removed (#3318):

  • scrapy.command

  • scrapy.contrib (with all submodules)

  • scrapy.contrib_exp (with all submodules)

  • scrapy.dupefilter

  • scrapy.linkextractor

  • scrapy.project

  • scrapy.spider

  • scrapy.spidermanager

  • scrapy.squeue

  • scrapy.stats

  • scrapy.statscol

  • scrapy.utils.decorator

See Module Relocations for more information, or use suggestions from Scrapy 1.5.x deprecation warnings to update your code.

Other deprecation removals:

  • Deprecated scrapy.interfaces.ISpiderManager is removed; please use scrapy.interfaces.ISpiderLoader.

  • Deprecated CrawlerSettings class is removed (#3327).

  • Deprecated Settings.overrides and Settings.defaults attributes are removed (#3327, #3359).

Other improvements, cleanups

  • All Scrapy tests now pass on Windows; Scrapy testing suite is executed in a Windows environment on CI (#3315).

  • Python 3.7 support (#3326, #3150, #3547).

  • Testing and CI fixes (#3526, #3538, #3308, #3311, #3309, #3305, #3210, #3299)

  • scrapy.http.cookies.CookieJar.clear accepts “domain”, “path” and “name” optional arguments (#3231).

  • additional files are included to sdist (#3495);

  • code style fixes (#3405, #3304);

  • unneeded .strip() call is removed (#3519);

  • collections.deque is used to store MiddlewareManager methods instead of a list (#3476)

Scrapy 1.5.2 (2019-01-22)

  • Security bugfix: Telnet console extension can be easily exploited by rogue websites POSTing content to http://localhost:6023, we haven’t found a way to exploit it from Scrapy, but it is very easy to trick a browser to do so and elevates the risk for local development environment.

    The fix is backward incompatible, it enables telnet user-password authentication by default with a random generated password. If you can’t upgrade right away, please consider setting TELNETCONSOLE_PORT out of its default value.

    See telnet console documentation for more info

  • Backport CI build failure under GCE environment due to boto import error.

Scrapy 1.5.1 (2018-07-12)

This is a maintenance release with important bug fixes, but no new features:

Scrapy 1.5.0 (2017-12-29)

This release brings small new features and improvements across the codebase. Some highlights:

  • Google Cloud Storage is supported in FilesPipeline and ImagesPipeline.

  • Crawling with proxy servers becomes more efficient, as connections to proxies can be reused now.

  • Warnings, exception and logging messages are improved to make debugging easier.

  • scrapy parse command now allows to set custom request meta via --meta argument.

  • Compatibility with Python 3.6, PyPy and PyPy3 is improved; PyPy and PyPy3 are now supported officially, by running tests on CI.

  • Better default handling of HTTP 308, 522 and 524 status codes.

  • Documentation is improved, as usual.

Backward Incompatible Changes

  • Scrapy 1.5 drops support for Python 3.3.

  • Default Scrapy User-Agent now uses https link to scrapy.org (#2983). This is technically backward-incompatible; override USER_AGENT if you relied on old value.

  • Logging of settings overridden by custom_settings is fixed; this is technically backward-incompatible because the logger changes from [scrapy.utils.log] to [scrapy.crawler]. If you’re parsing Scrapy logs, please update your log parsers (#1343).

  • LinkExtractor now ignores m4v extension by default, this is change in behavior.

  • 522 and 524 status codes are added to RETRY_HTTP_CODES (#2851)

New features

  • Support <link> tags in Response.follow (#2785)

  • Support for ptpython REPL (#2654)

  • Google Cloud Storage support for FilesPipeline and ImagesPipeline (#2923).

  • New --meta option of the “scrapy parse” command allows to pass additional request.meta (#2883)

  • Populate spider variable when using shell.inspect_response (#2812)

  • Handle HTTP 308 Permanent Redirect (#2844)

  • Add 522 and 524 to RETRY_HTTP_CODES (#2851)

  • Log versions information at startup (#2857)

  • scrapy.mail.MailSender now works in Python 3 (it requires Twisted 17.9.0)

  • Connections to proxy servers are reused (#2743)

  • Add template for a downloader middleware (#2755)

  • Explicit message for NotImplementedError when parse callback not defined (#2831)

  • CrawlerProcess got an option to disable installation of root log handler (#2921)

  • LinkExtractor now ignores m4v extension by default

  • Better log messages for responses over DOWNLOAD_WARNSIZE and DOWNLOAD_MAXSIZE limits (#2927)

  • Show warning when a URL is put to Spider.allowed_domains instead of a domain (#2250).

Bug fixes

  • Fix logging of settings overridden by custom_settings; this is technically backward-incompatible because the logger changes from [scrapy.utils.log] to [scrapy.crawler], so please update your log parsers if needed (#1343)

  • Default Scrapy User-Agent now uses https link to scrapy.org (#2983). This is technically backward-incompatible; override USER_AGENT if you relied on old value.

  • Fix PyPy and PyPy3 test failures, support them officially (#2793, #2935, #2990, #3050, #2213, #3048)

  • Fix DNS resolver when DNSCACHE_ENABLED=False (#2811)

  • Add cryptography for Debian Jessie tox test env (#2848)

  • Add verification to check if Request callback is callable (#2766)

  • Port extras/qpsclient.py to Python 3 (#2849)

  • Use getfullargspec under the scenes for Python 3 to stop DeprecationWarning (#2862)

  • Update deprecated test aliases (#2876)

  • Fix SitemapSpider support for alternate links (#2853)

Docs

  • Added missing bullet point for the AUTOTHROTTLE_TARGET_CONCURRENCY setting. (#2756)

  • Update Contributing docs, document new support channels (#2762, #3038)

  • Include references to Scrapy subreddit in the docs

  • Fix broken links; use https:// for external links (#2978, #2982, #2958)

  • Document CloseSpider extension better (#2759)

  • Use pymongo.collection.Collection.insert_one() in MongoDB example (#2781)

  • Spelling mistake and typos (#2828, #2837, #2884, #2924)

  • Clarify CSVFeedSpider.headers documentation (#2826)

  • Document DontCloseSpider exception and clarify spider_idle (#2791)

  • Update “Releases” section in README (#2764)

  • Fix rst syntax in DOWNLOAD_FAIL_ON_DATALOSS docs (#2763)

  • Small fix in description of startproject arguments (#2866)

  • Clarify data types in Response.body docs (#2922)

  • Add a note about request.meta['depth'] to DepthMiddleware docs (#2374)

  • Add a note about request.meta['dont_merge_cookies'] to CookiesMiddleware docs (#2999)

  • Up-to-date example of project structure (#2964, #2976)

  • A better example of ItemExporters usage (#2989)

  • Document from_crawler methods for spider and downloader middlewares (#3019)

Scrapy 1.4.0 (2017-05-18)

Scrapy 1.4 does not bring that many breathtaking new features but quite a few handy improvements nonetheless.

Scrapy now supports anonymous FTP sessions with customizable user and password via the new FTP_USER and FTP_PASSWORD settings. And if you’re using Twisted version 17.1.0 or above, FTP is now available with Python 3.

There’s a new response.follow method for creating requests; it is now a recommended way to create Requests in Scrapy spiders. This method makes it easier to write correct spiders; response.follow has several advantages over creating scrapy.Request objects directly:

  • it handles relative URLs;

  • it works properly with non-ascii URLs on non-UTF8 pages;

  • in addition to absolute and relative URLs it supports Selectors; for <a> elements it can also extract their href values.

For example, instead of this:

for href in response.css('li.page a::attr(href)').extract():
    url = response.urljoin(href)
    yield scrapy.Request(url, self.parse, encoding=response.encoding)

One can now write this:

for a in response.css('li.page a'):
    yield response.follow(a, self.parse)

Link extractors are also improved. They work similarly to what a regular modern browser would do: leading and trailing whitespace are removed from attributes (think href="   http://example.com") when building Link objects. This whitespace-stripping also happens for action attributes with FormRequest.

Please also note that link extractors do not canonicalize URLs by default anymore. This was puzzling users every now and then, and it’s not what browsers do in fact, so we removed that extra transformation on extracted links.

For those of you wanting more control on the Referer: header that Scrapy sends when following links, you can set your own Referrer Policy. Prior to Scrapy 1.4, the default RefererMiddleware would simply and blindly set it to the URL of the response that generated the HTTP request (which could leak information on your URL seeds). By default, Scrapy now behaves much like your regular browser does. And this policy is fully customizable with W3C standard values (or with something really custom of your own if you wish). See REFERRER_POLICY for details.

To make Scrapy spiders easier to debug, Scrapy logs more stats by default in 1.4: memory usage stats, detailed retry stats, detailed HTTP error code stats. A similar change is that HTTP cache path is also visible in logs now.

Last but not least, Scrapy now has the option to make JSON and XML items more human-readable, with newlines between items and even custom indenting offset, using the new FEED_EXPORT_INDENT setting.

Enjoy! (Or read on for the rest of changes in this release.)

Deprecations and Backward Incompatible Changes

  • Default to canonicalize=False in scrapy.linkextractors.LinkExtractor (#2537, fixes #1941 and #1982): warning, this is technically backward-incompatible

  • Enable memusage extension by default (#2539, fixes #2187); this is technically backward-incompatible so please check if you have any non-default MEMUSAGE_*** options set.

  • EDITOR environment variable now takes precedence over EDITOR option defined in settings.py (#1829); Scrapy default settings no longer depend on environment variables. This is technically a backward incompatible change.

  • Spider.make_requests_from_url is deprecated (#1728, fixes #1495).

New Features

Bug fixes

  • LinkExtractor now strips leading and trailing whitespaces from attributes (#2547, fixes #1614)

  • Properly handle whitespaces in action attribute in FormRequest (#2548)

  • Buffer CONNECT response bytes from proxy until all HTTP headers are received (#2495, fixes #2491)

  • FTP downloader now works on Python 3, provided you use Twisted>=17.1 (#2599)

  • Use body to choose response type after decompressing content (#2393, fixes #2145)

  • Always decompress Content-Encoding: gzip at HttpCompressionMiddleware stage (#2391)

  • Respect custom log level in Spider.custom_settings (#2581, fixes #1612)

  • ‘make htmlview’ fix for macOS (#2661)

  • Remove “commands” from the command list (#2695)

  • Fix duplicate Content-Length header for POST requests with empty body (#2677)

  • Properly cancel large downloads, i.e. above DOWNLOAD_MAXSIZE (#1616)

  • ImagesPipeline: fixed processing of transparent PNG images with palette (#2675)

Cleanups & Refactoring

  • Tests: remove temp files and folders (#2570), fixed ProjectUtilsTest on macOS (#2569), use portable pypy for Linux on Travis CI (#2710)

  • Separate building request from _requests_to_follow in CrawlSpider (#2562)

  • Remove “Python 3 progress” badge (#2567)

  • Add a couple more lines to .gitignore (#2557)

  • Remove bumpversion prerelease configuration (#2159)

  • Add codecov.yml file (#2750)

  • Set context factory implementation based on Twisted version (#2577, fixes #2560)

  • Add omitted self arguments in default project middleware template (#2595)

  • Remove redundant slot.add_request() call in ExecutionEngine (#2617)

  • Catch more specific os.error exception in scrapy.pipelines.files.FSFilesStore (#2644)

  • Change “localhost” test server certificate (#2720)

  • Remove unused MEMUSAGE_REPORT setting (#2576)

Documentation

  • Binary mode is required for exporters (#2564, fixes #2553)

  • Mention issue with FormRequest.from_response() due to bug in lxml (#2572)

  • Use single quotes uniformly in templates (#2596)

  • Document ftp_user and ftp_password meta keys (#2587)

  • Removed section on deprecated contrib/ (#2636)

  • Recommend Anaconda when installing Scrapy on Windows (#2477, fixes #2475)

  • FAQ: rewrite note on Python 3 support on Windows (#2690)

  • Rearrange selector sections (#2705)

  • Remove __nonzero__ from SelectorList docs (#2683)

  • Mention how to disable request filtering in documentation of DUPEFILTER_CLASS setting (#2714)

  • Add sphinx_rtd_theme to docs setup readme (#2668)

  • Open file in text mode in JSON item writer example (#2729)

  • Clarify allowed_domains example (#2670)

Scrapy 1.3.3 (2017-03-10)

Bug fixes

  • Make SpiderLoader raise ImportError again by default for missing dependencies and wrong SPIDER_MODULES. These exceptions were silenced as warnings since 1.3.0. A new setting is introduced to toggle between warning or exception if needed ; see SPIDER_LOADER_WARN_ONLY for details.

Scrapy 1.3.2 (2017-02-13)

Bug fixes

  • Preserve request class when converting to/from dicts (utils.reqser) (#2510).

  • Use consistent selectors for author field in tutorial (#2551).

  • Fix TLS compatibility in Twisted 17+ (#2558)

Scrapy 1.3.1 (2017-02-08)

New features

  • Support 'True' and 'False' string values for boolean settings (#2519); you can now do something like scrapy crawl myspider -s REDIRECT_ENABLED=False.

  • Support kwargs with response.xpath() to use XPath variables and ad-hoc namespaces declarations ; this requires at least Parsel v1.1 (#2457).

  • Add support for Python 3.6 (#2485).

  • Run tests on PyPy (warning: some tests still fail, so PyPy is not supported yet).

Bug fixes

  • Enforce DNS_TIMEOUT setting (#2496).

  • Fix view command ; it was a regression in v1.3.0 (#2503).

  • Fix tests regarding *_EXPIRES settings with Files/Images pipelines (#2460).

  • Fix name of generated pipeline class when using basic project template (#2466).

  • Fix compatibility with Twisted 17+ (#2496, #2528).

  • Fix scrapy.Item inheritance on Python 3.6 (#2511).

  • Enforce numeric values for components order in SPIDER_MIDDLEWARES, DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES, EXTENSIONS and SPIDER_CONTRACTS (#2420).

Documentation

  • Reword Code of Conduct section and upgrade to Contributor Covenant v1.4 (#2469).

  • Clarify that passing spider arguments converts them to spider attributes (#2483).

  • Document formid argument on FormRequest.from_response() (#2497).

  • Add .rst extension to README files (#2507).

  • Mention LevelDB cache storage backend (#2525).

  • Use yield in sample callback code (#2533).

  • Add note about HTML entities decoding with .re()/.re_first() (#1704).

  • Typos (#2512, #2534, #2531).

Cleanups

  • Remove redundant check in MetaRefreshMiddleware (#2542).

  • Faster checks in LinkExtractor for allow/deny patterns (#2538).

  • Remove dead code supporting old Twisted versions (#2544).

Scrapy 1.3.0 (2016-12-21)

This release comes rather soon after 1.2.2 for one main reason: it was found out that releases since 0.18 up to 1.2.2 (included) use some backported code from Twisted (scrapy.xlib.tx.*), even if newer Twisted modules are available. Scrapy now uses twisted.web.client and twisted.internet.endpoints directly. (See also cleanups below.)

As it is a major change, we wanted to get the bug fix out quickly while not breaking any projects using the 1.2 series.

New Features

  • MailSender now accepts single strings as values for to and cc arguments (#2272)

  • scrapy fetch url, scrapy shell url and fetch(url) inside Scrapy shell now follow HTTP redirections by default (#2290); See fetch and shell for details.

  • HttpErrorMiddleware now logs errors with INFO level instead of DEBUG; this is technically backward incompatible so please check your log parsers.

  • By default, logger names now use a long-form path, e.g. [scrapy.extensions.logstats], instead of the shorter “top-level” variant of prior releases (e.g. [scrapy]); this is backward incompatible if you have log parsers expecting the short logger name part. You can switch back to short logger names using LOG_SHORT_NAMES set to True.

Dependencies & Cleanups

  • Scrapy now requires Twisted >= 13.1 which is the case for many Linux distributions already.

  • As a consequence, we got rid of scrapy.xlib.tx.* modules, which copied some of Twisted code for users stuck with an “old” Twisted version

  • ChunkedTransferMiddleware is deprecated and removed from the default downloader middlewares.

Scrapy 1.2.3 (2017-03-03)

  • Packaging fix: disallow unsupported Twisted versions in setup.py

Scrapy 1.2.2 (2016-12-06)

Bug fixes

  • Fix a cryptic traceback when a pipeline fails on open_spider() (#2011)

  • Fix embedded IPython shell variables (fixing #396 that re-appeared in 1.2.0, fixed in #2418)

  • A couple of patches when dealing with robots.txt:

    • handle (non-standard) relative sitemap URLs (#2390)

    • handle non-ASCII URLs and User-Agents in Python 2 (#2373)

Documentation

  • Document "download_latency" key in Request’s meta dict (#2033)

  • Remove page on (deprecated & unsupported) Ubuntu packages from ToC (#2335)

  • A few fixed typos (#2346, #2369, #2369, #2380) and clarifications (#2354, #2325, #2414)

Other changes

  • Advertize conda-forge as Scrapy’s official conda channel (#2387)

  • More helpful error messages when trying to use .css() or .xpath() on non-Text Responses (#2264)

  • startproject command now generates a sample middlewares.py file (#2335)

  • Add more dependencies’ version info in scrapy version verbose output (#2404)

  • Remove all *.pyc files from source distribution (#2386)

Scrapy 1.2.1 (2016-10-21)

Bug fixes

  • Include OpenSSL’s more permissive default ciphers when establishing TLS/SSL connections (#2314).

  • Fix “Location” HTTP header decoding on non-ASCII URL redirects (#2321).

Documentation

  • Fix JsonWriterPipeline example (#2302).

  • Various notes: #2330 on spider names, #2329 on middleware methods processing order, #2327 on getting multi-valued HTTP headers as lists.

Other changes

  • Removed www. from start_urls in built-in spider templates (#2299).

Scrapy 1.2.0 (2016-10-03)

New Features

  • New FEED_EXPORT_ENCODING setting to customize the encoding used when writing items to a file. This can be used to turn off \uXXXX escapes in JSON output. This is also useful for those wanting something else than UTF-8 for XML or CSV output (#2034).

  • startproject command now supports an optional destination directory to override the default one based on the project name (#2005).

  • New SCHEDULER_DEBUG setting to log requests serialization failures (#1610).

  • JSON encoder now supports serialization of set instances (#2058).

  • Interpret application/json-amazonui-streaming as TextResponse (#1503).

  • scrapy is imported by default when using shell tools (shell, inspect_response) (#2248).

Bug fixes

  • DefaultRequestHeaders middleware now runs before UserAgent middleware (#2088). Warning: this is technically backward incompatible, though we consider this a bug fix.

  • HTTP cache extension and plugins that use the .scrapy data directory now work outside projects (#1581). Warning: this is technically backward incompatible, though we consider this a bug fix.

  • Selector does not allow passing both response and text anymore (#2153).

  • Fixed logging of wrong callback name with scrapy parse (#2169).

  • Fix for an odd gzip decompression bug (#1606).

  • Fix for selected callbacks when using CrawlSpider with scrapy parse (#2225).

  • Fix for invalid JSON and XML files when spider yields no items (#872).

  • Implement flush() for StreamLogger avoiding a warning in logs (#2125).

Refactoring

Tests & Requirements

Scrapy’s new requirements baseline is Debian 8 “Jessie”. It was previously Ubuntu 12.04 Precise. What this means in practice is that we run continuous integration tests with these (main) packages versions at a minimum: Twisted 14.0, pyOpenSSL 0.14, lxml 3.4.

Scrapy may very well work with older versions of these packages (the code base still has switches for older Twisted versions for example) but it is not guaranteed (because it’s not tested anymore).

Documentation

  • Grammar fixes: #2128, #1566.

  • Download stats badge removed from README (#2160).

  • New Scrapy architecture diagram (#2165).

  • Updated Response parameters documentation (#2197).

  • Reworded misleading RANDOMIZE_DOWNLOAD_DELAY description (#2190).

  • Add StackOverflow as a support channel (#2257).

Scrapy 1.1.4 (2017-03-03)

  • Packaging fix: disallow unsupported Twisted versions in setup.py

Scrapy 1.1.3 (2016-09-22)

Bug fixes

  • Class attributes for subclasses of ImagesPipeline and FilesPipeline work as they did before 1.1.1 (#2243, fixes #2198)

Documentation

Scrapy 1.1.2 (2016-08-18)

Bug fixes

  • Introduce a missing IMAGES_STORE_S3_ACL setting to override the default ACL policy in ImagesPipeline when uploading images to S3 (note that default ACL policy is “private” – instead of “public-read” – since Scrapy 1.1.0)

  • IMAGES_EXPIRES default value set back to 90 (the regression was introduced in 1.1.1)

Scrapy 1.1.1 (2016-07-13)

Bug fixes

  • Add “Host” header in CONNECT requests to HTTPS proxies (#2069)

  • Use response body when choosing response class (#2001, fixes #2000)

  • Do not fail on canonicalizing URLs with wrong netlocs (#2038, fixes #2010)

  • a few fixes for HttpCompressionMiddleware (and SitemapSpider):

    • Do not decode HEAD responses (#2008, fixes #1899)

    • Handle charset parameter in gzip Content-Type header (#2050, fixes #2049)

    • Do not decompress gzip octet-stream responses (#2065, fixes #2063)

  • Catch (and ignore with a warning) exception when verifying certificate against IP-address hosts (#2094, fixes #2092)

  • Make FilesPipeline and ImagesPipeline backward compatible again regarding the use of legacy class attributes for customization (#1989, fixes #1985)

New features

  • Enable genspider command outside project folder (#2052)

  • Retry HTTPS CONNECT TunnelError by default (#1974)

Documentation

  • FEED_TEMPDIR setting at lexicographical position (commit 9b3c72c)

  • Use idiomatic .extract_first() in overview (#1994)

  • Update years in copyright notice (commit c2c8036)

  • Add information and example on errbacks (#1995)

  • Use “url” variable in downloader middleware example (#2015)

  • Grammar fixes (#2054, #2120)

  • New FAQ entry on using BeautifulSoup in spider callbacks (#2048)

  • Add notes about Scrapy not working on Windows with Python 3 (#2060)

  • Encourage complete titles in pull requests (#2026)

Tests

  • Upgrade py.test requirement on Travis CI and Pin pytest-cov to 2.2.1 (#2095)

Scrapy 1.1.0 (2016-05-11)

This 1.1 release brings a lot of interesting features and bug fixes:

  • Scrapy 1.1 has beta Python 3 support (requires Twisted >= 15.5). See Beta Python 3 Support for more details and some limitations.

  • Hot new features:

    • Item loaders now support nested loaders (#1467).

    • FormRequest.from_response improvements (#1382, #1137).

    • Added setting AUTOTHROTTLE_TARGET_CONCURRENCY and improved AutoThrottle docs (#1324).

    • Added response.text to get body as unicode (#1730).

    • Anonymous S3 connections (#1358).

    • Deferreds in downloader middlewares (#1473). This enables better robots.txt handling (#1471).

    • HTTP caching now follows RFC2616 more closely, added settings HTTPCACHE_ALWAYS_STORE and HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_RESPONSE_CACHE_CONTROLS (#1151).

    • Selectors were extracted to the parsel library (#1409). This means you can use Scrapy Selectors without Scrapy and also upgrade the selectors engine without needing to upgrade Scrapy.

    • HTTPS downloader now does TLS protocol negotiation by default, instead of forcing TLS 1.0. You can also set the SSL/TLS method using the new DOWNLOADER_CLIENT_TLS_METHOD setting.

  • These bug fixes may require your attention:

    • Don’t retry bad requests (HTTP 400) by default (#1289). If you need the old behavior, add 400 to RETRY_HTTP_CODES.

    • Fix shell files argument handling (#1710, #1550). If you try scrapy shell index.html it will try to load the URL http://index.html, use scrapy shell ./index.html to load a local file.

    • Robots.txt compliance is now enabled by default for newly-created projects (#1724). Scrapy will also wait for robots.txt to be downloaded before proceeding with the crawl (#1735). If you want to disable this behavior, update ROBOTSTXT_OBEY in settings.py file after creating a new project.

    • Exporters now work on unicode, instead of bytes by default (#1080). If you use PythonItemExporter, you may want to update your code to disable binary mode which is now deprecated.

    • Accept XML node names containing dots as valid (#1533).

    • When uploading files or images to S3 (with FilesPipeline or ImagesPipeline), the default ACL policy is now “private” instead of “public” Warning: backward incompatible!. You can use FILES_STORE_S3_ACL to change it.

    • We’ve reimplemented canonicalize_url() for more correct output, especially for URLs with non-ASCII characters (#1947). This could change link extractors output compared to previous Scrapy versions. This may also invalidate some cache entries you could still have from pre-1.1 runs. Warning: backward incompatible!.

Keep reading for more details on other improvements and bug fixes.

Beta Python 3 Support

We have been hard at work to make Scrapy run on Python 3. As a result, now you can run spiders on Python 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5 (Twisted >= 15.5 required). Some features are still missing (and some may never be ported).

Almost all builtin extensions/middlewares are expected to work. However, we are aware of some limitations in Python 3:

  • Scrapy does not work on Windows with Python 3

  • Sending emails is not supported

  • FTP download handler is not supported

  • Telnet console is not supported

Additional New Features and Enhancements

  • Scrapy now has a Code of Conduct (#1681).

  • Command line tool now has completion for zsh (#934).

  • Improvements to scrapy shell:

    • Support for bpython and configure preferred Python shell via SCRAPY_PYTHON_SHELL (#1100, #1444).

    • Support URLs without scheme (#1498) Warning: backward incompatible!

    • Bring back support for relative file path (#1710, #1550).

  • Added MEMUSAGE_CHECK_INTERVAL_SECONDS setting to change default check interval (#1282).

  • Download handlers are now lazy-loaded on first request using their scheme (#1390, #1421).

  • HTTPS download handlers do not force TLS 1.0 anymore; instead, OpenSSL’s SSLv23_method()/TLS_method() is used allowing to try negotiating with the remote hosts the highest TLS protocol version it can (#1794, #1629).

  • RedirectMiddleware now skips the status codes from handle_httpstatus_list on spider attribute or in Request’s meta key (#1334, #1364, #1447).

  • Form submission:

    • now works with <button> elements too (#1469).

    • an empty string is now used for submit buttons without a value (#1472)

  • Dict-like settings now have per-key priorities (#1135, #1149 and #1586).

  • Sending non-ASCII emails (#1662)

  • CloseSpider and SpiderState extensions now get disabled if no relevant setting is set (#1723, #1725).

  • Added method ExecutionEngine.close (#1423).

  • Added method CrawlerRunner.create_crawler (#1528).

  • Scheduler priority queue can now be customized via SCHEDULER_PRIORITY_QUEUE (#1822).

  • .pps links are now ignored by default in link extractors (#1835).

  • temporary data folder for FTP and S3 feed storages can be customized using a new FEED_TEMPDIR setting (#1847).

  • FilesPipeline and ImagesPipeline settings are now instance attributes instead of class attributes, enabling spider-specific behaviors (#1891).

  • JsonItemExporter now formats opening and closing square brackets on their own line (first and last lines of output file) (#1950).

  • If available, botocore is used for S3FeedStorage, S3DownloadHandler and S3FilesStore (#1761, #1883).

  • Tons of documentation updates and related fixes (#1291, #1302, #1335, #1683, #1660, #1642, #1721, #1727, #1879).

  • Other refactoring, optimizations and cleanup (#1476, #1481, #1477, #1315, #1290, #1750, #1881).

Deprecations and Removals

  • Added to_bytes and to_unicode, deprecated str_to_unicode and unicode_to_str functions (#778).

  • binary_is_text is introduced, to replace use of isbinarytext (but with inverse return value) (#1851)

  • The optional_features set has been removed (#1359).

  • The --lsprof command line option has been removed (#1689). Warning: backward incompatible, but doesn’t break user code.

  • The following datatypes were deprecated (#1720):

    • scrapy.utils.datatypes.MultiValueDictKeyError

    • scrapy.utils.datatypes.MultiValueDict

    • scrapy.utils.datatypes.SiteNode

  • The previously bundled scrapy.xlib.pydispatch library was deprecated and replaced by pydispatcher.

Relocations

Bugfixes

  • Scrapy does not retry requests that got a HTTP 400 Bad Request response anymore (#1289). Warning: backward incompatible!

  • Support empty password for http_proxy config (#1274).

  • Interpret application/x-json as TextResponse (#1333).

  • Support link rel attribute with multiple values (#1201).

  • Fixed scrapy.FormRequest.from_response when there is a <base> tag (#1564).

  • Fixed TEMPLATES_DIR handling (#1575).

  • Various FormRequest fixes (#1595, #1596, #1597).

  • Makes _monkeypatches more robust (#1634).

  • Fixed bug on XMLItemExporter with non-string fields in items (#1738).

  • Fixed startproject command in macOS (#1635).

  • Fixed PythonItemExporter and CSVExporter for non-string item types (#1737).

  • Various logging related fixes (#1294, #1419, #1263, #1624, #1654, #1722, #1726 and #1303).

  • Fixed bug in utils.template.render_templatefile() (#1212).

  • sitemaps extraction from robots.txt is now case-insensitive (#1902).

  • HTTPS+CONNECT tunnels could get mixed up when using multiple proxies to same remote host (#1912).

Scrapy 1.0.7 (2017-03-03)

  • Packaging fix: disallow unsupported Twisted versions in setup.py

Scrapy 1.0.6 (2016-05-04)

  • FIX: RetryMiddleware is now robust to non-standard HTTP status codes (#1857)

  • FIX: Filestorage HTTP cache was checking wrong modified time (#1875)

  • DOC: Support for Sphinx 1.4+ (#1893)

  • DOC: Consistency in selectors examples (#1869)

Scrapy 1.0.5 (2016-02-04)

Scrapy 1.0.4 (2015-12-30)

Scrapy 1.0.3 (2015-08-11)

Scrapy 1.0.2 (2015-08-06)

Scrapy 1.0.1 (2015-07-01)

Scrapy 1.0.0 (2015-06-19)

You will find a lot of new features and bugfixes in this major release. Make sure to check our updated overview to get a glance of some of the changes, along with our brushed tutorial.

Support for returning dictionaries in spiders

Declaring and returning Scrapy Items is no longer necessary to collect the scraped data from your spider, you can now return explicit dictionaries instead.

Classic version

class MyItem(scrapy.Item):
    url = scrapy.Field()

class MySpider(scrapy.Spider):
    def parse(self, response):
        return MyItem(url=response.url)

New version

class MySpider(scrapy.Spider):
    def parse(self, response):
        return {'url': response.url}

Per-spider settings (GSoC 2014)

Last Google Summer of Code project accomplished an important redesign of the mechanism used for populating settings, introducing explicit priorities to override any given setting. As an extension of that goal, we included a new level of priority for settings that act exclusively for a single spider, allowing them to redefine project settings.

Start using it by defining a custom_settings class variable in your spider:

class MySpider(scrapy.Spider):
    custom_settings = {
        "DOWNLOAD_DELAY": 5.0,
        "RETRY_ENABLED": False,
    }

Read more about settings population: Settings

Python Logging

Scrapy 1.0 has moved away from Twisted logging to support Python built in’s as default logging system. We’re maintaining backward compatibility for most of the old custom interface to call logging functions, but you’ll get warnings to switch to the Python logging API entirely.

Old version

from scrapy import log
log.msg('MESSAGE', log.INFO)

New version

import logging
logging.info('MESSAGE')

Logging with spiders remains the same, but on top of the log() method you’ll have access to a custom logger created for the spider to issue log events:

class MySpider(scrapy.Spider):
    def parse(self, response):
        self.logger.info('Response received')

Read more in the logging documentation: Logging

Crawler API refactoring (GSoC 2014)

Another milestone for last Google Summer of Code was a refactoring of the internal API, seeking a simpler and easier usage. Check new core interface in: Core API

A common situation where you will face these changes is while running Scrapy from scripts. Here’s a quick example of how to run a Spider manually with the new API:

from scrapy.crawler import CrawlerProcess

process = CrawlerProcess({
    'USER_AGENT': 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)'
})
process.crawl(MySpider)
process.start()

Bear in mind this feature is still under development and its API may change until it reaches a stable status.

See more examples for scripts running Scrapy: Common Practices

Module Relocations

There’s been a large rearrangement of modules trying to improve the general structure of Scrapy. Main changes were separating various subpackages into new projects and dissolving both scrapy.contrib and scrapy.contrib_exp into top level packages. Backward compatibility was kept among internal relocations, while importing deprecated modules expect warnings indicating their new place.

Full list of relocations

Outsourced packages

Note

These extensions went through some minor changes, e.g. some setting names were changed. Please check the documentation in each new repository to get familiar with the new usage.

Old location

New location

scrapy.commands.deploy

scrapyd-client (See other alternatives here: Deploying Spiders)

scrapy.contrib.djangoitem

scrapy-djangoitem

scrapy.webservice

scrapy-jsonrpc

scrapy.contrib_exp and scrapy.contrib dissolutions

Old location

New location

scrapy.contrib_exp.downloadermiddleware.decompression

scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.decompression

scrapy.contrib_exp.iterators

scrapy.utils.iterators

scrapy.contrib.downloadermiddleware

scrapy.downloadermiddlewares

scrapy.contrib.exporter

scrapy.exporters

scrapy.contrib.linkextractors

scrapy.linkextractors

scrapy.contrib.loader

scrapy.loader

scrapy.contrib.loader.processor

scrapy.loader.processors

scrapy.contrib.pipeline

scrapy.pipelines

scrapy.contrib.spidermiddleware

scrapy.spidermiddlewares

scrapy.contrib.spiders

scrapy.spiders

  • scrapy.contrib.closespider

  • scrapy.contrib.corestats

  • scrapy.contrib.debug

  • scrapy.contrib.feedexport

  • scrapy.contrib.httpcache

  • scrapy.contrib.logstats

  • scrapy.contrib.memdebug

  • scrapy.contrib.memusage

  • scrapy.contrib.spiderstate

  • scrapy.contrib.statsmailer

  • scrapy.contrib.throttle

scrapy.extensions.*

Plural renames and Modules unification

Old location

New location

scrapy.command

scrapy.commands

scrapy.dupefilter

scrapy.dupefilters

scrapy.linkextractor

scrapy.linkextractors

scrapy.spider

scrapy.spiders

scrapy.squeue

scrapy.squeues

scrapy.statscol

scrapy.statscollectors

scrapy.utils.decorator

scrapy.utils.decorators

Class renames

Old location

New location

scrapy.spidermanager.SpiderManager

scrapy.spiderloader.SpiderLoader

Settings renames

Old location

New location

SPIDER_MANAGER_CLASS

SPIDER_LOADER_CLASS

Changelog

New Features and Enhancements

  • Python logging (#1060, #1235, #1236, #1240, #1259, #1278, #1286)

  • FEED_EXPORT_FIELDS option (#1159, #1224)

  • Dns cache size and timeout options (#1132)

  • support namespace prefix in xmliter_lxml (#963)

  • Reactor threadpool max size setting (#1123)

  • Allow spiders to return dicts. (#1081)

  • Add Response.urljoin() helper (#1086)

  • look in ~/.config/scrapy.cfg for user config (#1098)

  • handle TLS SNI (#1101)

  • Selectorlist extract first (#624, #1145)

  • Added JmesSelect (#1016)

  • add gzip compression to filesystem http cache backend (#1020)

  • CSS support in link extractors (#983)

  • httpcache dont_cache meta #19 #689 (#821)

  • add signal to be sent when request is dropped by the scheduler (#961)

  • avoid download large response (#946)

  • Allow to specify the quotechar in CSVFeedSpider (#882)

  • Add referer to “Spider error processing” log message (#795)

  • process robots.txt once (#896)

  • GSoC Per-spider settings (#854)

  • Add project name validation (#817)

  • GSoC API cleanup (#816, #1128, #1147, #1148, #1156, #1185, #1187, #1258, #1268, #1276, #1285, #1284)

  • Be more responsive with IO operations (#1074 and #1075)

  • Do leveldb compaction for httpcache on closing (#1297)

Deprecations and Removals

  • Deprecate htmlparser link extractor (#1205)

  • remove deprecated code from FeedExporter (#1155)

  • a leftover for.15 compatibility (#925)

  • drop support for CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_SPIDER (#895)

  • Drop old engine code (#911)

  • Deprecate SgmlLinkExtractor (#777)

Relocations

  • Move exporters/__init__.py to exporters.py (#1242)

  • Move base classes to their packages (#1218, #1233)

  • Module relocation (#1181, #1210)

  • rename SpiderManager to SpiderLoader (#1166)

  • Remove djangoitem (#1177)

  • remove scrapy deploy command (#1102)

  • dissolve contrib_exp (#1134)

  • Deleted bin folder from root, fixes #913 (#914)

  • Remove jsonrpc based webservice (#859)

  • Move Test cases under project root dir (#827, #841)

  • Fix backward incompatibility for relocated paths in settings (#1267)

Documentation

  • CrawlerProcess documentation (#1190)

  • Favoring web scraping over screen scraping in the descriptions (#1188)

  • Some improvements for Scrapy tutorial (#1180)

  • Documenting Files Pipeline together with Images Pipeline (#1150)

  • deployment docs tweaks (#1164)

  • Added deployment section covering scrapyd-deploy and shub (#1124)

  • Adding more settings to project template (#1073)

  • some improvements to overview page (#1106)

  • Updated link in docs/topics/architecture.rst (#647)

  • DOC reorder topics (#1022)

  • updating list of Request.meta special keys (#1071)

  • DOC document download_timeout (#898)

  • DOC simplify extension docs (#893)

  • Leaks docs (#894)

  • DOC document from_crawler method for item pipelines (#904)

  • Spider_error doesn’t support deferreds (#1292)

  • Corrections & Sphinx related fixes (#1220, #1219, #1196, #1172, #1171, #1169, #1160, #1154, #1127, #1112, #1105, #1041, #1082, #1033, #944, #866, #864, #796, #1260, #1271, #1293, #1298)

Bugfixes

  • Item multi inheritance fix (#353, #1228)

  • ItemLoader.load_item: iterate over copy of fields (#722)

  • Fix Unhandled error in Deferred (RobotsTxtMiddleware) (#1131, #1197)

  • Force to read DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT as int (#954)

  • scrapy.utils.misc.load_object should print full traceback (#902)

  • Fix bug for “.local” host name (#878)

  • Fix for Enabled extensions, middlewares, pipelines info not printed anymore (#879)

  • fix dont_merge_cookies bad behaviour when set to false on meta (#846)

Python 3 In Progress Support

  • disable scrapy.telnet if twisted.conch is not available (#1161)

  • fix Python 3 syntax errors in ajaxcrawl.py (#1162)

  • more python3 compatibility changes for urllib (#1121)

  • assertItemsEqual was renamed to assertCountEqual in Python 3. (#1070)

  • Import unittest.mock if available. (#1066)

  • updated deprecated cgi.parse_qsl to use six’s parse_qsl (#909)

  • Prevent Python 3 port regressions (#830)

  • PY3: use MutableMapping for python 3 (#810)

  • PY3: use six.BytesIO and six.moves.cStringIO (#803)

  • PY3: fix xmlrpclib and email imports (#801)

  • PY3: use six for robotparser and urlparse (#800)

  • PY3: use six.iterkeys, six.iteritems, and tempfile (#799)

  • PY3: fix has_key and use six.moves.configparser (#798)

  • PY3: use six.moves.cPickle (#797)

  • PY3 make it possible to run some tests in Python3 (#776)

Tests

  • remove unnecessary lines from py3-ignores (#1243)

  • Fix remaining warnings from pytest while collecting tests (#1206)

  • Add docs build to travis (#1234)

  • TST don’t collect tests from deprecated modules. (#1165)

  • install service_identity package in tests to prevent warnings (#1168)

  • Fix deprecated settings API in tests (#1152)

  • Add test for webclient with POST method and no body given (#1089)

  • py3-ignores.txt supports comments (#1044)

  • modernize some of the asserts (#835)

  • selector.__repr__ test (#779)

Code refactoring

  • CSVFeedSpider cleanup: use iterate_spider_output (#1079)

  • remove unnecessary check from scrapy.utils.spider.iter_spider_output (#1078)

  • Pydispatch pep8 (#992)

  • Removed unused ‘load=False’ parameter from walk_modules() (#871)

  • For consistency, use job_dir helper in SpiderState extension. (#805)

  • rename “sflo” local variables to less cryptic “log_observer” (#775)