Scrapy Documentation Guide

Scrapy Documentation
Release 1.3.2
Scrapy developers
February 13, 2017

First steps
1 Getting help 3
2 First steps 5
2.1 Scrapy at a glance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2 Installation guide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.3 Scrapy Tutorial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.4 Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
3 Basic concepts 21
3.1 Command line tool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
3.2 Spiders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
3.3 Selectors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
3.4 Items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.5 Item Loaders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.6 Scrapy shell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
3.7 Item Pipeline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
3.8 Feed exports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
3.9 Requests and Responses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
3.10 Link Extractors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
3.11 Settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
3.12 Exceptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
4 Built-in services 111

4.1 Logging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
4.2 Stats Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
4.3 Sending e-mail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
4.4 Telnet Console . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
4.5 Web Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
5 Solving specific problems 123

5.1 Frequently Asked Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
5.2 Debugging Spiders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
5.3 Spiders Contracts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
5.4 Common Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
5.5 Broad Crawls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
5.6 Using Firefox for scraping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
5.7 Using Firebug for scraping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
5.8 Debugging memory leaks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
i
5.9 Downloading and processing files and images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
5.10 Deploying Spiders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
5.11 AutoThrottle extension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
5.12 Benchmarking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
5.13 Jobs: pausing and resuming crawls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
6 Extending Scrapy 159

6.1 Architecture overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
6.2 Downloader Middleware . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
6.3 Spider Middleware . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
6.4 Extensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
6.5 Core API . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
6.6 Signals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
6.7 Item Exporters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
7 All the rest 201

7.1 Release notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
7.2 Contributing to Scrapy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
7.3 Versioning and API Stability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
Python Module Index 245
ii
Scrapy Documentation, Release 1.3.2
This documentation contains everything you need to know about Scrapy.
First steps 1
2 First steps
CHAPTER 1
Getting help
Having trouble? Wed like to help!

Try the FAQ its got answers to some common questions.
Looking for specific information? Try the genindex or modindex.
Ask or search questions in StackOverflow using the scrapy tag,
Search for information in the archives of the scrapy-users mailing list, or post a question.
Ask a question in the #scrapy IRC channel,
Report bugs with Scrapy in our issue tracker.
3
4 Chapter 1. Getting help

CHAPTER 2
First steps
2.1 Scrapy at a glance
Scrapy is an application framework for crawling web sites and extracting structured data which can be used for a wide
range of useful applications, like data mining, information processing or historical archival.
Even though Scrapy was originally designed for web scraping, it can also be used to extract data using APIs (such as
Amazon Associates Web Services) or as a general purpose web crawler.
2.1.1 Walk-through of an example spider
In order to show you what Scrapy brings to the table, well walk you through an example of a Scrapy Spider using the
simplest way to run a spider.
Heres the code for a spider that scrapes famous quotes from website http://quotes.toscrape.com, following the pagi-
nation:
import scrapy
class QuotesSpider(scrapy.Spider):
name = "quotes"
start_urls = [
'http://quotes.toscrape.com/tag/humor/',
]
def parse(self, response):

for quote in response.css('div.quote'):
yield {
'text': quote.css('span.text::text').extract_first(),
'author': quote.xpath('span/small/text()').extract_first(),
}
next_page = response.css('li.next a::attr("href")').extract_first()

if next_page is not None:
next_page = response.urljoin(next_page)
yield scrapy.Request(next_page, callback=self.parse)
Put this in a text file, name it to something like quotes_spider.py and run the spider using the runspider
command:
5
scrapy runspider quotes_spider.py -o quotes.json
When this finishes you will have in the quotes.json file a list of the quotes in JSON format, containing text and
author, looking like this (reformatted here for better readability):
[{
"author": "Jane Austen",
"text": "\u201cThe person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be
},
{
"author": "Groucho Marx",
"text": "\u201cOutside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to re
},
{
"author": "Steve Martin",
"text": "\u201cA day without sunshine is like, you know, night.\u201d"
},
...]
What just happened?
When you ran the command scrapy runspider quotes_spider.py, Scrapy looked for a Spider definition
inside it and ran it through its crawler engine.
The crawl started by making requests to the URLs defined in the start_urls attribute (in this case, only the
URL for quotes in humor category) and called the default callback method parse, passing the response object as
an argument. In the parse callback, we loop through the quote elements using a CSS Selector, yield a Python dict
with the extracted quote text and author, look for a link to the next page and schedule another request using the same
parse method as callback.
Here you notice one of the main advantages about Scrapy: requests are scheduled and processed asynchronously. This
means that Scrapy doesnt need to wait for a request to be finished and processed, it can send another request or do
other things in the meantime. This also means that other requests can keep going even if some request fails or an error
happens while handling it.
While this enables you to do very fast crawls (sending multiple concurrent requests at the same time, in a fault-tolerant
way) Scrapy also gives you control over the politeness of the crawl through a few settings. You can do things like
setting a download delay between each request, limiting amount of concurrent requests per domain or per IP, and even
using an auto-throttling extension that tries to figure out these automatically.
Note: This is using feed exports to generate the JSON file, you can easily change the export format (XML or CSV,
for example) or the storage backend (FTP or Amazon S3, for example). You can also write an item pipeline to store
the items in a database.
2.1.2 What else?
Youve seen how to extract and store items from a website using Scrapy, but this is just the surface. Scrapy provides a
lot of powerful features for making scraping easy and efficient, such as:
Built-in support for selecting and extracting data from HTML/XML sources using extended CSS selectors and
XPath expressions, with helper methods to extract using regular expressions.
An interactive shell console (IPython aware) for trying out the CSS and XPath expressions to scrape data, very
useful when writing or debugging your spiders.
6 Chapter 2. First steps

Built-in support for generating feed exports in multiple formats (JSON, CSV, XML) and storing them in multiple
backends (FTP, S3, local filesystem)
Robust encoding support and auto-detection, for dealing with foreign, non-standard and broken encoding dec-
larations.
Strong extensibility support, allowing you to plug in your own functionality using signals and a well-defined
API (middlewares, extensions, and pipelines).
Wide range of built-in extensions and middlewares for handling:
cookies and session handling
HTTP features like compression, authentication, caching
user-agent spoofing
robots.txt
crawl depth restriction
and more
A Telnet console for hooking into a Python console running inside your Scrapy process, to introspect and debug
your crawler
Plus other goodies like reusable spiders to crawl sites from Sitemaps and XML/CSV feeds, a media pipeline
for automatically downloading images (or any other media) associated with the scraped items, a caching DNS
resolver, and much more!
2.1.3 Whats next?
The next steps for you are to install Scrapy, follow through the tutorial to learn how to create a full-blown Scrapy
project and join the community. Thanks for your interest!
2.2 Installation guide
2.2.1 Installing Scrapy
Scrapy runs on Python 2.7 and Python 3.3 or above (except on Windows where Python 3 is not supported yet).
If youre already familiar with installation of Python packages, you can install Scrapy and its dependencies from PyPI
with:
pip install Scrapy
We strongly recommend that you install Scrapy in a dedicated virtualenv, to avoid conflicting with your system
packages.
For more detailed and platform specifics instructions, read on.
Things that are good to know
Scrapy is written in pure Python and depends on a few key Python packages (among others):
lxml, an efficient XML and HTML parser
parsel, an HTML/XML data extraction library written on top of lxml,
2.2. Installation guide 7

w3lib, a multi-purpose helper for dealing with URLs and web page encodings
twisted, an asynchronous networking framework
cryptography and pyOpenSSL, to deal with various network-level security needs
The minimal versions which Scrapy is tested against are:
Twisted 14.0
lxml 3.4
pyOpenSSL 0.14
Scrapy may work with older versions of these packages but it is not guaranteed it will continue working because its
not being tested against them.
Some of these packages themselves depends on non-Python packages that might require additional installation steps
depending on your platform. Please check platform-specific guides below.
In case of any trouble related to these dependencies, please refer to their respective installation instructions:
lxml installation
cryptography installation
Using a virtual environment (recommended)
TL;DR: We recommend installing Scrapy inside a virtual environment on all platforms.

Python packages can be installed either globally (a.k.a system wide), or in user-space. We do not recommend installing
scrapy system wide.
Instead, we recommend that you install scrapy within a so-called virtual environment (virtualenv). Virtualenvs allow
you to not conflict with already-installed Python system packages (which could break some of your system tools and
scripts), and still install packages normally with pip (without sudo and the likes).
To get started with virtual environments, see virtualenv installation instructions. To install it globally (having it globally
installed actually helps here), it should be a matter of running:
$ [sudo] pip install virtualenv
Check this user guide on how to create your virtualenv.
Note: If you use Linux or OS X, virtualenvwrapper is a handy tool to create virtualenvs.
Once you have created a virtualenv, you can install scrapy inside it with pip, just like any other Python package. (See
platform-specific guides below for non-Python dependencies that you may need to install beforehand).
Python virtualenvs can be created to use Python 2 by default, or Python 3 by default.
If you want to install scrapy with Python 3, install scrapy within a Python 3 virtualenv.
And if you want to install scrapy with Python 2, install scrapy within a Python 2 virtualenv.
2.2.2 Platform specific installation notes
Windows
Install Python 2.7 from https://www.python.org/downloads/

You need to adjust PATH environment variable to include paths to the Python executable and additional scripts.
The following paths need to be added to PATH:
C:\Python27\;C:\Python27\Scripts\;
To update the PATH open a Command prompt and run:

c:\python27\python.exe c:\python27\tools\scripts\win_add2path.py
Close the command prompt window and reopen it so changes take effect, run the following command and check
it shows the expected Python version:
python --version
Install pywin32 from http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/

Be sure you download the architecture (win32 or amd64) that matches your system
(Only required for Python<2.7.9) Install pip from https://pip.pypa.io/en/latest/installing/
Now open a Command prompt to check pip is installed correctly:
pip --version
At this point Python 2.7 and pip package manager must be working, lets install Scrapy:
pip install Scrapy
Note: Python 3 is not supported on Windows. This is because Scrapy core requirement Twisted does not support
Python 3 on Windows.
Ubuntu 12.04 or above
Scrapy is currently tested with recent-enough versions of lxml, twisted and pyOpenSSL, and is compatible with recent
Ubuntu distributions. But it should support older versions of Ubuntu too, like Ubuntu 12.04, albeit with potential
issues with TLS connections.
Dont use the python-scrapy package provided by Ubuntu, they are typically too old and slow to catch up with
latest Scrapy.
To install scrapy on Ubuntu (or Ubuntu-based) systems, you need to install these dependencies:
sudo apt-get install python-dev python-pip libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev zlib1g-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev
python-dev, zlib1g-dev, libxml2-dev and libxslt1-dev are required for lxml

libssl-dev and libffi-dev are required for cryptography
If you want to install scrapy on Python 3, youll also need Python 3 development headers:
sudo apt-get install python3 python3-dev
Inside a virtualenv, you can install Scrapy with pip after that:
pip install scrapy
Note: The same non-python dependencies can be used to install Scrapy in Debian Wheezy (7.0) and above.
2.2. Installation guide 9

Mac OS X
Building Scrapys dependencies requires the presence of a C compiler and development headers. On OS X this is
typically provided by Apples Xcode development tools. To install the Xcode command line tools open a terminal
window and run:
xcode-select --install
Theres a known issue that prevents pip from updating system packages. This has to be addressed to successfully
install Scrapy and its dependencies. Here are some proposed solutions:
(Recommended) Dont use system python, install a new, updated version that doesnt conflict with the rest of
your system. Heres how to do it using the homebrew package manager:
Install homebrew following the instructions in http://brew.sh/
Update your PATH variable to state that homebrew packages should be used before system packages
(Change .bashrc to .zshrc accordantly if youre using zsh as default shell):
echo "export PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:$PATH" >> ~/.bashrc
Reload .bashrc to ensure the changes have taken place:

source ~/.bashrc
Install python:
brew install python
Latest versions of python have pip bundled with them so you wont need to install it separately. If this is
not the case, upgrade python:
brew update; brew upgrade python
(Optional) Install Scrapy inside an isolated python environment.

This method is a workaround for the above OS X issue, but its an overall good practice for managing depen-
dencies and can complement the first method.
virtualenv is a tool you can use to create virtual environments in python. We recommended reading a tutorial
like http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/dev/virtualenvs/ to get started.
After any of these workarounds you should be able to install Scrapy:
pip install Scrapy
Anaconda
Using Anaconda is an alternative to using a virtualenv and installing with pip.
Note: For Windows users, or if you have issues installing through pip, this is the recommended way to install Scrapy.
If you already have Anaconda or Miniconda installed, the conda-forge community have up-to-date packages for Linux,
Windows and OS X.
To install Scrapy using conda, run:
conda install -c conda-forge scrapy

2.3 Scrapy Tutorial
In this tutorial, well assume that Scrapy is already installed on your system. If thats not the case, see Installation
guide.
We are going to scrape quotes.toscrape.com, a website that lists quotes from famous authors.
This tutorial will walk you through these tasks:
1. Creating a new Scrapy project
2. Writing a spider to crawl a site and extract data
3. Exporting the scraped data using the command line
4. Changing spider to recursively follow links
5. Using spider arguments
Scrapy is written in Python. If youre new to the language you might want to start by getting an idea of what the
language is like, to get the most out of Scrapy.
If youre already familiar with other languages, and want to learn Python quickly, we recommend reading through
Dive Into Python 3. Alternatively, you can follow the Python Tutorial.
If youre new to programming and want to start with Python, you may find useful the online book Learn Python The
Hard Way. You can also take a look at this list of Python resources for non-programmers.
2.3.1 Creating a project
Before you start scraping, you will have to set up a new Scrapy project. Enter a directory where youd like to store
your code and run:
scrapy startproject tutorial
This will create a tutorial directory with the following contents:

tutorial/
scrapy.cfg # deploy configuration file
tutorial/ # project's Python module, you'll import your code from here
__init__.py
items.py # project items definition file
pipelines.py # project pipelines file
settings.py # project settings file
spiders/ # a directory where you'll later put your spiders

__init__.py
2.3.2 Our first Spider
Spiders are classes that you define and that Scrapy uses to scrape information from a website (or a group of websites).
They must subclass scrapy.Spider and define the initial requests to make, optionally how to follow links in the
pages, and how to parse the downloaded page content to extract data.
2.3. Scrapy Tutorial 11

This is the code for our first Spider. Save it in a file named quotes_spider.py under the tutorial/spiders
directory in your project:
import scrapy
name = "quotes"
def start_requests(self):
urls = [
'http://quotes.toscrape.com/page/1/',
]
for url in urls:
yield scrapy.Request(url=url, callback=self.parse)

page = response.url.split("/")[-2]
filename = 'quotes-%s.html' % page
with open(filename, 'wb') as f:
f.write(response.body)
self.log('Saved file %s' % filename)
As you can see, our Spider subclasses scrapy.Spider and defines some attributes and methods:
name: identifies the Spider. It must be unique within a project, that is, you cant set the same name for different
Spiders.
start_requests(): must return an iterable of Requests (you can return a list of requests or write a generator
function) which the Spider will begin to crawl from. Subsequent requests will be generated successively from
these initial requests.
parse(): a method that will be called to handle the response downloaded for each of the requests made.
The response parameter is an instance of TextResponse that holds the page content and has further helpful
methods to handle it.
The parse() method usually parses the response, extracting the scraped data as dicts and also finding new
URLs to follow and creating new requests (Request) from them.
How to run our spider
To put our spider to work, go to the projects top level directory and run:
scrapy crawl quotes
This command runs the spider with name quotes that weve just added, that will send some requests for the
quotes.toscrape.com domain. You will get an output similar to this:
... (omitted for brevity)
2016-12-16 21:24:05 [scrapy.core.engine] INFO: Spider opened
2016-12-16 21:24:05 [scrapy.extensions.logstats] INFO: Crawled 0 pages (at 0 pages/min), scraped 0 it
2016-12-16 21:24:05 [scrapy.extensions.telnet] DEBUG: Telnet console listening on 127.0.0.1:6023
2016-12-16 21:24:05 [scrapy.core.engine] DEBUG: Crawled (404) <GET http://quotes.toscrape.com/robots.
2016-12-16 21:24:05 [scrapy.core.engine] DEBUG: Crawled (200) <GET http://quotes.toscrape.com/page/1/
2016-12-16 21:24:05 [quotes] DEBUG: Saved file quotes-1.html
2016-12-16 21:24:05 [quotes] DEBUG: Saved file quotes-2.html

2016-12-16 21:24:05 [scrapy.core.engine] INFO: Closing spider (finished)

...
Now, check the files in the current directory. You should notice that two new files have been created: quotes-1.html
and quotes-2.html, with the content for the respective URLs, as our parse method instructs.
Note: If you are wondering why we havent parsed the HTML yet, hold on, we will cover that soon.
What just happened under the hood?
Scrapy schedules the scrapy.Request objects returned by the start_requests method of the Spider. Upon
receiving a response for each one, it instantiates Response objects and calls the callback method associated with the
request (in this case, the parse method) passing the response as argument.
A shortcut to the start_requests method
Instead of implementing a start_requests() method that generates scrapy.Request objects from URLs,
you can just define a start_urls class attribute with a list of URLs. This list will then be used by the default
implementation of start_requests() to create the initial requests for your spider:
import scrapy
name = "quotes"
start_urls = [
]

page = response.url.split("/")[-2]
filename = 'quotes-%s.html' % page
with open(filename, 'wb') as f:
The parse() method will be called to handle each of the requests for those URLs, even though we havent explicitly
told Scrapy to do so. This happens because parse() is Scrapys default callback method, which is called for requests
without an explicitly assigned callback.
Extracting data
The best way to learn how to extract data with Scrapy is trying selectors using the shell Scrapy shell. Run:
scrapy shell 'http://quotes.toscrape.com/page/1/'
Note: Remember to always enclose urls in quotes when running Scrapy shell from command-line, otherwise urls
containing arguments (ie. & character) will not work.
On Windows, use double quotes instead:

scrapy shell "http://quotes.toscrape.com/page/1/"
You will see something like:

[ ... Scrapy log here ... ]
[s] Available Scrapy objects:
[s] scrapy scrapy module (contains scrapy.Request, scrapy.Selector, etc)
[s] crawler <scrapy.crawler.Crawler object at 0x7fa91d888c90>
[s] item {}
[s] request <GET http://quotes.toscrape.com/page/1/>
[s] response <200 http://quotes.toscrape.com/page/1/>
[s] settings <scrapy.settings.Settings object at 0x7fa91d888c10>
[s] spider <DefaultSpider 'default' at 0x7fa91c8af990>
[s] Useful shortcuts:
[s] shelp() Shell help (print this help)
[s] fetch(req_or_url) Fetch request (or URL) and update local objects
[s] view(response) View response in a browser
>>>
Using the shell, you can try selecting elements using CSS with the response object:
>>> response.css('title')
[<Selector xpath='descendant-or-self::title' data='<title>Quotes to Scrape</title>'>]
The result of running response.css(title) is a list-like object called SelectorList, which represents a
list of Selector objects that wrap around XML/HTML elements and allow you to run further queries to fine-grain
the selection or extract the data.
To extract the text from the title above, you can do:
>>> response.css('title::text').extract()
['Quotes to Scrape']
There are two things to note here: one is that weve added ::text to the CSS query, to mean we want to select
only the text elements directly inside <title> element. If we dont specify ::text, wed get the full title element,
including its tags:
>>> response.css('title').extract()
['<title>Quotes to Scrape</title>']
The other thing is that the result of calling .extract() is a list, because were dealing with an instance of
SelectorList. When you know you just want the first result, as in this case, you can do:
>>> response.css('title::text').extract_first()
'Quotes to Scrape'
As an alternative, you couldve written:

>>> response.css('title::text')[0].extract()
'Quotes to Scrape'
However, using .extract_first() avoids an IndexError and returns None when it doesnt find any element
matching the selection.
Theres a lesson here: for most scraping code, you want it to be resilient to errors due to things not being found on a
page, so that even if some parts fail to be scraped, you can at least get some data.
Besides the extract() and extract_first() methods, you can also use the re() method to extract using
regular expressions:

>>> response.css('title::text').re(r'Quotes.*')
['Quotes to Scrape']
>>> response.css('title::text').re(r'Q\w+')
['Quotes']
>>> response.css('title::text').re(r'(\w+) to (\w+)')
['Quotes', 'Scrape']
In order to find the proper CSS selectors to use, you might find useful opening the response page from the shell in
your web browser using view(response). You can use your browser developer tools or extensions like Firebug
(see sections about Using Firebug for scraping and Using Firefox for scraping).
Selector Gadget is also a nice tool to quickly find CSS selector for visually selected elements, which works in many
browsers.
XPath: a brief intro
Besides CSS, Scrapy selectors also support using XPath expressions:

>>> response.xpath('//title')
[<Selector xpath='//title' data='<title>Quotes to Scrape</title>'>]
>>> response.xpath('//title/text()').extract_first()
'Quotes to Scrape'
XPath expressions are very powerful, and are the foundation of Scrapy Selectors. In fact, CSS selectors are converted
to XPath under-the-hood. You can see that if you read closely the text representation of the selector objects in the
shell.
While perhaps not as popular as CSS selectors, XPath expressions offer more power because besides navigating the
structure, it can also look at the content. Using XPath, youre able to select things like: select the link that contains the
text Next Page. This makes XPath very fitting to the task of scraping, and we encourage you to learn XPath even if
you already know how to construct CSS selectors, it will make scraping much easier.
We wont cover much of XPath here, but you can read more about using XPath with Scrapy Selectors here. To learn
more about XPath, we recommend this tutorial to learn XPath through examples, and this tutorial to learn how to
think in XPath.
Extracting quotes and authors
Now that you know a bit about selection and extraction, lets complete our spider by writing the code to extract the
quotes from the web page.
Each quote in http://quotes.toscrape.com is represented by HTML elements that look like this:
<div class="quote">
<span class="text">The world as we have created it is a process of our
thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.</span>
<span>
by <small class="author">Albert Einstein</small>
<a href="/author/Albert-Einstein">(about)</a>
</span>
<div class="tags">
Tags:
<a class="tag" href="/tag/change/page/1/">change</a>
<a class="tag" href="/tag/deep-thoughts/page/1/">deep-thoughts</a>
<a class="tag" href="/tag/thinking/page/1/">thinking</a>
<a class="tag" href="/tag/world/page/1/">world</a>

</div>
</div>
Lets open up scrapy shell and play a bit to find out how to extract the data we want:
$ scrapy shell 'http://quotes.toscrape.com'
We get a list of selectors for the quote HTML elements with:

>>> response.css("div.quote")
Each of the selectors returned by the query above allows us to run further queries over their sub-elements. Lets assign
the first selector to a variable, so that we can run our CSS selectors directly on a particular quote:
>>> quote = response.css("div.quote")[0]
Now, lets extract title, author and the tags from that quote using the quote object we just created:
>>> title = quote.css("span.text::text").extract_first()
>>> title
'The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing
>>> author = quote.css("small.author::text").extract_first()
>>> author
'Albert Einstein'
Given that the tags are a list of strings, we can use the .extract() method to get all of them:
>>> tags = quote.css("div.tags a.tag::text").extract()
>>> tags
['change', 'deep-thoughts', 'thinking', 'world']
Having figured out how to extract each bit, we can now iterate over all the quotes elements and put them together into
a Python dictionary:
>>> for quote in response.css("div.quote"):
... text = quote.css("span.text::text").extract_first()
... author = quote.css("small.author::text").extract_first()
... tags = quote.css("div.tags a.tag::text").extract()
... print(dict(text=text, author=author, tags=tags))
{'tags': ['change', 'deep-thoughts', 'thinking', 'world'], 'author': 'Albert Einstein', 'text': 'The
{'tags': ['abilities', 'choices'], 'author': 'J.K. Rowling', 'text': 'It is our choices, Harry, that
... a few more of these, omitted for brevity
>>>
Extracting data in our spider
Lets get back to our spider. Until now, it doesnt extract any data in particular, just saves the whole HTML page to a
local file. Lets integrate the extraction logic above into our spider.
A Scrapy spider typically generates many dictionaries containing the data extracted from the page. To do that, we use
the yield Python keyword in the callback, as you can see below:
import scrapy
name = "quotes"
start_urls = [

]

yield {
'author': quote.css('small.author::text').extract_first(),
'tags': quote.css('div.tags a.tag::text').extract(),
}
If you run this spider, it will output the extracted data with the log:
2016-09-19 18:57:19 [scrapy.core.scraper] DEBUG: Scraped from <200 http://quotes.toscrape.com/page/1/
{'tags': ['life', 'love'], 'author': 'Andr Gide', 'text': 'It is better to be hated for what you ar
2016-09-19 18:57:19 [scrapy.core.scraper] DEBUG: Scraped from <200 http://quotes.toscrape.com/page/1/
{'tags': ['edison', 'failure', 'inspirational', 'paraphrased'], 'author': 'Thomas A. Edison', 'text':
2.3.3 Storing the scraped data
The simplest way to store the scraped data is by using Feed exports, with the following command:
scrapy crawl quotes -o quotes.json
That will generate an quotes.json file containing all scraped items, serialized in JSON.
For historic reasons, Scrapy appends to a given file instead of overwriting its contents. If you run this command twice
without removing the file before the second time, youll end up with a broken JSON file.
You can also used other formats, like JSON Lines:
scrapy crawl quotes -o quotes.jl
The JSON Lines format is useful because its stream-like, you can easily append new records to it. It doesnt have the
same problem of JSON when you run twice. Also, as each record is a separate line, you can process big files without
having to fit everything in memory, there are tools like JQ to help doing that at the command-line.
In small projects (like the one in this tutorial), that should be enough. However, if you want to perform more complex
things with the scraped items, you can write an Item Pipeline. A placeholder file for Item Pipelines has been set up
for you when the project is created, in tutorial/pipelines.py. Though you dont need to implement any item
pipelines if you just want to store the scraped items.
2.3.4 Following links
Lets say, instead of just scraping the stuff from the first two pages from http://quotes.toscrape.com, you want quotes
from all the pages in the website.
Now that you know how to extract data from pages, lets see how to follow links from them.
First thing is to extract the link to the page we want to follow. Examining our page, we can see there is a link to the
next page with the following markup:
<ul class="pager">
<li class="next">
<a href="/page/2/">Next <span aria-hidden="true">→</span></a>
</li>
</ul>

We can try extracting it in the shell:

>>> response.css('li.next a').extract_first()
'<a href="/page/2/">Next <span aria-hidden="true"></span></a>'
This gets the anchor element, but we want the attribute href. For that, Scrapy supports a CSS extension that lets you
select the attribute contents, like this:
>>> response.css('li.next a::attr(href)').extract_first()
'/page/2/'
Lets see now our spider modified to recursively follow the link to the next page, extracting data from it:
import scrapy
name = "quotes"
start_urls = [
]

yield {
'tags': quote.css('div.tags a.tag::text').extract(),
}
next_page = response.css('li.next a::attr(href)').extract_first()

Now, after extracting the data, the parse() method looks for the link to the next page, builds a full absolute URL
using the urljoin() method (since the links can be relative) and yields a new request to the next page, registering
itself as callback to handle the data extraction for the next page and to keep the crawling going through all the pages.
What you see here is Scrapys mechanism of following links: when you yield a Request in a callback method, Scrapy
will schedule that request to be sent and register a callback method to be executed when that request finishes.
Using this, you can build complex crawlers that follow links according to rules you define, and extract different kinds
of data depending on the page its visiting.
In our example, it creates a sort of loop, following all the links to the next page until it doesnt find one handy for
crawling blogs, forums and other sites with pagination.
More examples and patterns
Here is another spider that illustrates callbacks and following links, this time for scraping author information:
import scrapy
class AuthorSpider(scrapy.Spider):
name = 'author'
start_urls = ['http://quotes.toscrape.com/']


# follow links to author pages
for href in response.css('.author + a::attr(href)').extract():
yield scrapy.Request(response.urljoin(href),
callback=self.parse_author)
# follow pagination links

def parse_author(self, response):

def extract_with_css(query):
return response.css(query).extract_first().strip()
yield {
'name': extract_with_css('h3.author-title::text'),
'birthdate': extract_with_css('.author-born-date::text'),
'bio': extract_with_css('.author-description::text'),
}
This spider will start from the main page, it will follow all the links to the authors pages calling the parse_author
callback for each of them, and also the pagination links with the parse callback as we saw before.
The parse_author callback defines a helper function to extract and cleanup the data from a CSS query and yields
the Python dict with the author data.
Another interesting thing this spider demonstrates is that, even if there are many quotes from the same author, we dont
need to worry about visiting the same author page multiple times. By default, Scrapy filters out duplicated requests to
URLs already visited, avoiding the problem of hitting servers too much because of a programming mistake. This can
be configured by the setting DUPEFILTER_CLASS.
Hopefully by now you have a good understanding of how to use the mechanism of following links and callbacks with
Scrapy.
As yet another example spider that leverages the mechanism of following links, check out the CrawlSpider class
for a generic spider that implements a small rules engine that you can use to write your crawlers on top of it.
Also, a common pattern is to build an item with data from more than one page, using a trick to pass additional data to
the callbacks.
2.3.5 Using spider arguments
You can provide command line arguments to your spiders by using the -a option when running them:
scrapy crawl quotes -o quotes-humor.json -a tag=humor
These arguments are passed to the Spiders __init__ method and become spider attributes by default.
In this example, the value provided for the tag argument will be available via self.tag. You can use this to make
your spider fetch only quotes with a specific tag, building the URL based on the argument:
import scrapy
name = "quotes"

url = 'http://quotes.toscrape.com/'
tag = getattr(self, 'tag', None)
if tag is not None:
url = url + 'tag/' + tag
yield scrapy.Request(url, self.parse)

yield {
}

yield scrapy.Request(next_page, self.parse)
If you pass the tag=humor argument to this spider, youll notice that it will only visit URLs from the humor tag,
such as http://quotes.toscrape.com/tag/humor.
You can learn more about handling spider arguments here.
2.3.6 Next steps
This tutorial covered only the basics of Scrapy, but theres a lot of other features not mentioned here. Check the What
else? section in Scrapy at a glance chapter for a quick overview of the most important ones.
You can continue from the section Basic concepts to know more about the command-line tool, spiders, selectors and
other things the tutorial hasnt covered like modeling the scraped data. If you prefer to play with an example project,
check the Examples section.
2.4 Examples
The best way to learn is with examples, and Scrapy is no exception. For this reason, there is an example Scrapy
project named quotesbot, that you can use to play and learn more about Scrapy. It contains two spiders for
http://quotes.toscrape.com, one using CSS selectors and another one using XPath expressions.
The quotesbot project is available at: https://github.com/scrapy/quotesbot. You can find more information about it in
the projects README.
If youre familiar with git, you can checkout the code. Otherwise you can download the project as a zip file by clicking
here.
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.

CHAPTER 3
Basic concepts
3.1 Command line tool
New in version 0.10.

Scrapy is controlled through the scrapy command-line tool, to be referred here as the Scrapy tool to differentiate
it from the sub-commands, which we just call commands or Scrapy commands.
The Scrapy tool provides several commands, for multiple purposes, and each one accepts a different set of arguments
and options.
(The scrapy deploy command has been removed in 1.0 in favor of the standalone scrapyd-deploy. See
Deploying your project.)
3.1.1 Configuration settings
Scrapy will look for configuration parameters in ini-style scrapy.cfg files in standard locations:
1. /etc/scrapy.cfg or c:\scrapy\scrapy.cfg (system-wide),
2. ~/.config/scrapy.cfg ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME) and ~/.scrapy.cfg ($HOME) for global (user-
wide) settings, and
3. scrapy.cfg inside a scrapy projects root (see next section).
Settings from these files are merged in the listed order of preference: user-defined values have higher priority than
system-wide defaults and project-wide settings will override all others, when defined.
Scrapy also understands, and can be configured through, a number of environment variables. Currently these are:
SCRAPY_SETTINGS_MODULE (see Designating the settings)
SCRAPY_PROJECT
SCRAPY_PYTHON_SHELL (see Scrapy shell)
3.1.2 Default structure of Scrapy projects
Before delving into the command-line tool and its sub-commands, lets first understand the directory structure of a
Scrapy project.
Though it can be modified, all Scrapy projects have the same file structure by default, similar to this:
21
scrapy.cfg
myproject/
__init__.py
items.py
pipelines.py
settings.py
spiders/
__init__.py
spider1.py
spider2.py
...
The directory where the scrapy.cfg file resides is known as the project root directory. That file contains the name
of the python module that defines the project settings. Here is an example:
[settings]
default = myproject.settings
3.1.3 Using the scrapy tool
You can start by running the Scrapy tool with no arguments and it will print some usage help and the available
commands:
Scrapy X.Y - no active project
Usage:
scrapy <command> [options] [args]
Available commands:
crawl Run a spider
fetch Fetch a URL using the Scrapy downloader
[...]
The first line will print the currently active project if youre inside a Scrapy project. In this example it was run from
outside a project. If run from inside a project it would have printed something like this:
Scrapy X.Y - project: myproject
Usage:
scrapy <command> [options] [args]
[...]
Creating projects
The first thing you typically do with the scrapy tool is create your Scrapy project:
scrapy startproject myproject [project_dir]
That will create a Scrapy project under the project_dir directory. If project_dir wasnt specified,
project_dir will be the same as myproject.
Next, you go inside the new project directory:
cd project_dir
And youre ready to use the scrapy command to manage and control your project from there.
22 Chapter 3. Basic concepts

Controlling projects
You use the scrapy tool from inside your projects to control and manage them.
For example, to create a new spider:
scrapy genspider mydomain mydomain.com
Some Scrapy commands (like crawl) must be run from inside a Scrapy project. See the commands reference below
for more information on which commands must be run from inside projects, and which not.
Also keep in mind that some commands may have slightly different behaviours when running them from inside
projects. For example, the fetch command will use spider-overridden behaviours (such as the user_agent attribute
to override the user-agent) if the url being fetched is associated with some specific spider. This is intentional, as the
fetch command is meant to be used to check how spiders are downloading pages.
3.1.4 Available tool commands
This section contains a list of the available built-in commands with a description and some usage examples. Remember,
you can always get more info about each command by running:
scrapy <command> -h
And you can see all available commands with:

scrapy -h
There are two kinds of commands, those that only work from inside a Scrapy project (Project-specific commands) and
those that also work without an active Scrapy project (Global commands), though they may behave slightly different
when running from inside a project (as they would use the project overridden settings).
Global commands:
startproject
genspider
settings
runspider
shell
fetch
view
version
Project-only commands:
crawl
check
list
edit
parse
bench
3.1. Command line tool 23

startproject
Syntax: scrapy startproject <project_name> [project_dir]

Requires project: no
Creates a new Scrapy project named project_name, under the project_dir directory. If project_dir
wasnt specified, project_dir will be the same as myproject.
Usage example:
$ scrapy startproject myproject
genspider
Syntax: scrapy genspider [-t template] <name> <domain>

Create a new spider in the current folder or in the current projects spiders folder, if called from inside a project.
The <name> parameter is set as the spiders name, while <domain> is used to generate the allowed_domains
and start_urls spiders attributes.
Usage example:
$ scrapy genspider -l
Available templates:
basic
crawl
csvfeed
xmlfeed
$ scrapy genspider example example.com

Created spider 'example' using template 'basic'
$ scrapy genspider -t crawl scrapyorg scrapy.org

Created spider 'scrapyorg' using template 'crawl'
This is just a convenience shortcut command for creating spiders based on pre-defined templates, but certainly not the
only way to create spiders. You can just create the spider source code files yourself, instead of using this command.
crawl
Syntax: scrapy crawl <spider>

Requires project: yes
Start crawling using a spider.
Usage examples:
$ scrapy crawl myspider
[ ... myspider starts crawling ... ]
check
Syntax: scrapy check [-l] <spider>


Run contract checks.

Usage examples:
$ scrapy check -l
first_spider
* parse
* parse_item
second_spider
* parse
* parse_item
$ scrapy check
[FAILED] first_spider:parse_item
>>> 'RetailPricex' field is missing
[FAILED] first_spider:parse
>>> Returned 92 requests, expected 0..4
list
Syntax: scrapy list

List all available spiders in the current project. The output is one spider per line.
Usage example:
$ scrapy list
spider1
spider2
edit
Syntax: scrapy edit <spider>

Edit the given spider using the editor defined in the EDITOR setting.
This command is provided only as a convenience shortcut for the most common case, the developer is of course free
to choose any tool or IDE to write and debug his spiders.
Usage example:
$ scrapy edit spider1
fetch
Syntax: scrapy fetch <url>

Downloads the given URL using the Scrapy downloader and writes the contents to standard output.
The interesting thing about this command is that it fetches the page how the spider would download it. For example,
if the spider has a USER_AGENT attribute which overrides the User Agent, it will use that one.

So this command can be used to see how your spider would fetch a certain page.
If used outside a project, no particular per-spider behaviour would be applied and it will just use the default Scrapy
downloader settings.
Supported options:
--spider=SPIDER: bypass spider autodetection and force use of specific spider
--headers: print the responses HTTP headers instead of the responses body
--no-redirect: do not follow HTTP 3xx redirects (default is to follow them)
Usage examples:
$ scrapy fetch --nolog http://www.example.com/some/page.html
[ ... html content here ... ]
$ scrapy fetch --nolog --headers http://www.example.com/

{'Accept-Ranges': ['bytes'],
'Age': ['1263 '],
'Connection': ['close '],
'Content-Length': ['596'],
'Content-Type': ['text/html; charset=UTF-8'],
'Date': ['Wed, 18 Aug 2010 23:59:46 GMT'],
'Etag': ['"573c1-254-48c9c87349680"'],
'Last-Modified': ['Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:30:18 GMT'],
'Server': ['Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)']}
view
Syntax: scrapy view <url>

Opens the given URL in a browser, as your Scrapy spider would see it. Sometimes spiders see pages differently
from regular users, so this can be used to check what the spider sees and confirm its what you expect.
Supported options:
--no-redirect: do not follow HTTP 3xx redirects (default is to follow them)
Usage example:
$ scrapy view http://www.example.com/some/page.html
[ ... browser starts ... ]
shell
Syntax: scrapy shell [url]

Starts the Scrapy shell for the given URL (if given) or empty if no URL is given. Also supports UNIX-style local file
paths, either relative with ./ or ../ prefixes or absolute file paths. See Scrapy shell for more info.
Supported options:

-c code: evaluate the code in the shell, print the result and exit
--no-redirect: do not follow HTTP 3xx redirects (default is to follow them); this only affects the URL
you may pass as argument on the command line; once you are inside the shell, fetch(url) will still follow
HTTP redirects by default.
Usage example:
$ scrapy shell http://www.example.com/some/page.html
[ ... scrapy shell starts ... ]
$ scrapy shell --nolog http://www.example.com/ -c '(response.status, response.url)'

(200, 'http://www.example.com/')
# shell follows HTTP redirects by default

$ scrapy shell --nolog http://httpbin.org/redirect-to?url=http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2F -c '(response.s
(200, 'http://example.com/')
# you can disable this with --no-redirect

# (only for the URL passed as command line argument)
$ scrapy shell --no-redirect --nolog http://httpbin.org/redirect-to?url=http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2F -
(302, 'http://httpbin.org/redirect-to?url=http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2F')
parse
Syntax: scrapy parse <url> [options]

Fetches the given URL and parses it with the spider that handles it, using the method passed with the --callback
option, or parse if not given.
Supported options:
--a NAME=VALUE: set spider argument (may be repeated)
--callback or -c: spider method to use as callback for parsing the response
--pipelines: process items through pipelines
--rules or -r: use CrawlSpider rules to discover the callback (i.e. spider method) to use for parsing the
response
--noitems: dont show scraped items
--nolinks: dont show extracted links
--nocolour: avoid using pygments to colorize the output
--depth or -d: depth level for which the requests should be followed recursively (default: 1)
--verbose or -v: display information for each depth level
Usage example:
$ scrapy parse http://www.example.com/ -c parse_item
[ ... scrapy log lines crawling example.com spider ... ]
>>> STATUS DEPTH LEVEL 1 <<<

# Scraped Items ------------------------------------------------------------
[{'name': u'Example item',

'category': u'Furniture',
'length': u'12 cm'}]
# Requests -----------------------------------------------------------------
[]
settings
Syntax: scrapy settings [options]

Get the value of a Scrapy setting.
If used inside a project itll show the project setting value, otherwise itll show the default Scrapy value for that setting.
Example usage:
$ scrapy settings --get BOT_NAME
scrapybot
$ scrapy settings --get DOWNLOAD_DELAY
0
runspider
Syntax: scrapy runspider <spider_file.py>

Run a spider self-contained in a Python file, without having to create a project.
Example usage:
$ scrapy runspider myspider.py
[ ... spider starts crawling ... ]
version
Syntax: scrapy version [-v]

Prints the Scrapy version. If used with -v it also prints Python, Twisted and Platform info, which is useful for bug
reports.
bench

Syntax: scrapy bench
Run a quick benchmark test. Benchmarking.

3.1.5 Custom project commands
You can also add your custom project commands by using the COMMANDS_MODULE setting. See the Scrapy com-
mands in scrapy/commands for examples on how to implement your commands.
COMMANDS_MODULE
Default: (empty string)

A module to use for looking up custom Scrapy commands. This is used to add custom commands for your Scrapy
project.
Example:
COMMANDS_MODULE = 'mybot.commands'
Register commands via setup.py entry points
Note: This is an experimental feature, use with caution.
You can also add Scrapy commands from an external library by adding a scrapy.commands section in the entry
points of the library setup.py file.
The following example adds my_command command:
from setuptools import setup, find_packages
setup(name='scrapy-mymodule',
entry_points={
'scrapy.commands': [
'my_command=my_scrapy_module.commands:MyCommand',
],
},
)
3.2 Spiders
Spiders are classes which define how a certain site (or a group of sites) will be scraped, including how to perform
the crawl (i.e. follow links) and how to extract structured data from their pages (i.e. scraping items). In other words,
Spiders are the place where you define the custom behaviour for crawling and parsing pages for a particular site (or,
in some cases, a group of sites).
For spiders, the scraping cycle goes through something like this:
1. You start by generating the initial Requests to crawl the first URLs, and specify a callback function to be called
with the response downloaded from those requests.
The first requests to perform are obtained by calling the start_requests() method which (by default)
generates Request for the URLs specified in the start_urls and the parse method as callback function
for the Requests.
2. In the callback function, you parse the response (web page) and return either dicts with extracted data, Item
objects, Request objects, or an iterable of these objects. Those Requests will also contain a callback (maybe
the same) and will then be downloaded by Scrapy and then their response handled by the specified callback.
3.2. Spiders 29
3. In callback functions, you parse the page contents, typically using Selectors (but you can also use BeautifulSoup,
lxml or whatever mechanism you prefer) and generate items with the parsed data.
4. Finally, the items returned from the spider will be typically persisted to a database (in some Item Pipeline) or
written to a file using Feed exports.
Even though this cycle applies (more or less) to any kind of spider, there are different kinds of default spiders bundled
into Scrapy for different purposes. We will talk about those types here.
3.2.1 scrapy.Spider
class scrapy.spiders.Spider
This is the simplest spider, and the one from which every other spider must inherit (including spiders that come
bundled with Scrapy, as well as spiders that you write yourself). It doesnt provide any special functionality. It
just provides a default start_requests() implementation which sends requests from the start_urls
spider attribute and calls the spiders method parse for each of the resulting responses.
name
A string which defines the name for this spider. The spider name is how the spider is located (and instan-
tiated) by Scrapy, so it must be unique. However, nothing prevents you from instantiating more than one
instance of the same spider. This is the most important spider attribute and its required.
If the spider scrapes a single domain, a common practice is to name the spider after the domain, with
or without the TLD. So, for example, a spider that crawls mywebsite.com would often be called
mywebsite.
Note: In Python 2 this must be ASCII only.
allowed_domains
An optional list of strings containing domains that this spider is allowed to crawl. Requests for URLs
not belonging to the domain names specified in this list (or their subdomains) wont be followed if
OffsiteMiddleware is enabled.
start_urls
A list of URLs where the spider will begin to crawl from, when no particular URLs are specified. So,
the first pages downloaded will be those listed here. The subsequent URLs will be generated successively
from data contained in the start URLs.
custom_settings
A dictionary of settings that will be overridden from the project wide configuration when running this
spider. It must be defined as a class attribute since the settings are updated before instantiation.
For a list of available built-in settings see: Built-in settings reference.
crawler
This attribute is set by the from_crawler() class method after initializating the class, and links to the
Crawler object to which this spider instance is bound.
Crawlers encapsulate a lot of components in the project for their single entry access (such as extensions,
middlewares, signals managers, etc). See Crawler API to know more about them.
settings
Configuration for running this spider. This is a Settings instance, see the Settings topic for a detailed
introduction on this subject.
logger
Python logger created with the Spiders name. You can use it to send log messages through it as described
on Logging from Spiders.

from_crawler(crawler, *args, **kwargs)

This is the class method used by Scrapy to create your spiders.
You probably wont need to override this directly because the default implementation acts as a proxy to
the __init__() method, calling it with the given arguments args and named arguments kwargs.
Nonetheless, this method sets the crawler and settings attributes in the new instance so they can be
accessed later inside the spiders code.
Parameters
crawler (Crawler instance) crawler to which the spider will be bound
args (list) arguments passed to the __init__() method
kwargs (dict) keyword arguments passed to the __init__() method
start_requests()
This method must return an iterable with the first Requests to crawl for this spider.
This is the method called by Scrapy when the spider is opened for scraping when no particular URLs
are specified. If particular URLs are specified, the make_requests_from_url() is used instead to
create the Requests. This method is also called only once from Scrapy, so its safe to implement it as a
generator.
The default implementation uses make_requests_from_url() to generate Requests for each url in
start_urls.
If you want to change the Requests used to start scraping a domain, this is the method to override. For
example, if you need to start by logging in using a POST request, you could do:
class MySpider(scrapy.Spider):
name = 'myspider'
return [scrapy.FormRequest("http://www.example.com/login",
formdata={'user': 'john', 'pass': 'secret'},
callback=self.logged_in)]
def logged_in(self, response):

# here you would extract links to follow and return Requests for
# each of them, with another callback
pass
make_requests_from_url(url)
A method that receives a URL and returns a Request object (or a list of Request objects) to scrape.
This method is used to construct the initial requests in the start_requests() method, and is typically
used to convert urls to requests.
Unless overridden, this method returns Requests with the parse() method as their callback function,
and with dont_filter parameter enabled (see Request class for more info).
parse(response)
This is the default callback used by Scrapy to process downloaded responses, when their requests dont
specify a callback.
The parse method is in charge of processing the response and returning scraped data and/or more URLs
to follow. Other Requests callbacks have the same requirements as the Spider class.
This method, as well as any other Request callback, must return an iterable of Request and/or dicts or
Item objects.
Parameters response (Response) the response to parse
3.2. Spiders 31
log(message[, level, component ])

Wrapper that sends a log message through the Spiders logger, kept for backwards compatibility. For
more information see Logging from Spiders.
closed(reason)
Called when the spider closes. This method provides a shortcut to signals.connect() for the
spider_closed signal.
Lets see an example:
import scrapy
name = 'example.com'
allowed_domains = ['example.com']
start_urls = [
'http://www.example.com/1.html',
]

self.logger.info('A response from %s just arrived!', response.url)
Return multiple Requests and items from a single callback:

import scrapy
start_urls = [
]

for h3 in response.xpath('//h3').extract():
yield {"title": h3}
for url in response.xpath('//a/@href').extract():

yield scrapy.Request(url, callback=self.parse)
Instead of start_urls you can use start_requests() directly; to give data more structure you can use Items:
import scrapy
from myproject.items import MyItem
yield scrapy.Request('http://www.example.com/1.html', self.parse)

for h3 in response.xpath('//h3').extract():
yield MyItem(title=h3)
for url in response.xpath('//a/@href').extract():

yield scrapy.Request(url, callback=self.parse)
3.2.2 Spider arguments
Spiders can receive arguments that modify their behaviour. Some common uses for spider arguments are to define the
start URLs or to restrict the crawl to certain sections of the site, but they can be used to configure any functionality of
the spider.
Spider arguments are passed through the crawl command using the -a option. For example:
scrapy crawl myspider -a category=electronics
Spiders can access arguments in their __init__ methods:

import scrapy
name = 'myspider'
def __init__(self, category=None, *args, **kwargs):

super(MySpider, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
self.start_urls = ['http://www.example.com/categories/%s' % category]
# ...
The default __init__ method will take any spider arguments and copy them to the spider as attributes. The above
example can also be written as follows:
import scrapy
name = 'myspider'
yield scrapy.Request('http://www.example.com/categories/%s' % self.category)
Keep in mind that spider arguments are only strings. The spider will not do any parsing on its own. If you were to
set the start_urls attribute from the command line, you would have to parse it on your own into a list using something
like ast.literal_eval or json.loads and then set it as an attribute. Otherwise, you would cause iteration over a start_urls
string (a very common python pitfall) resulting in each character being seen as a separate url.
A valid use case is to set the http auth credentials used by HttpAuthMiddleware or the user agent used by
UserAgentMiddleware:
scrapy crawl myspider -a http_user=myuser -a http_pass=mypassword -a user_agent=mybot
Spider arguments can also be passed through the Scrapyd schedule.json API. See Scrapyd documentation.
3.2.3 Generic Spiders
Scrapy comes with some useful generic spiders that you can use to subclass your spiders from. Their aim is to provide
convenient functionality for a few common scraping cases, like following all links on a site based on certain rules,
crawling from Sitemaps, or parsing an XML/CSV feed.
3.2. Spiders 33
For the examples used in the following spiders, well assume you have a project with a TestItem declared in a
myproject.items module:
import scrapy
class TestItem(scrapy.Item):
id = scrapy.Field()
name = scrapy.Field()
description = scrapy.Field()
CrawlSpider
class scrapy.spiders.CrawlSpider
This is the most commonly used spider for crawling regular websites, as it provides a convenient mechanism for
following links by defining a set of rules. It may not be the best suited for your particular web sites or project,
but its generic enough for several cases, so you can start from it and override it as needed for more custom
functionality, or just implement your own spider.
Apart from the attributes inherited from Spider (that you must specify), this class supports a new attribute:
rules
Which is a list of one (or more) Rule objects. Each Rule defines a certain behaviour for crawling the
site. Rules objects are described below. If multiple rules match the same link, the first one will be used,
according to the order theyre defined in this attribute.
This spider also exposes an overrideable method:
parse_start_url(response)
This method is called for the start_urls responses. It allows to parse the initial responses and must return
either an Item object, a Request object, or an iterable containing any of them.
Crawling rules
class scrapy.spiders.Rule(link_extractor, callback=None, cb_kwargs=None, follow=None, pro-

cess_links=None, process_request=None)
link_extractor is a Link Extractor object which defines how links will be extracted from each crawled
page.
callback is a callable or a string (in which case a method from the spider object with that name will be used)
to be called for each link extracted with the specified link_extractor. This callback receives a response as its first
argument and must return a list containing Item and/or Request objects (or any subclass of them).
Warning: When writing crawl spider rules, avoid using parse as callback, since the CrawlSpider uses
the parse method itself to implement its logic. So if you override the parse method, the crawl spider will
no longer work.
cb_kwargs is a dict containing the keyword arguments to be passed to the callback function.
follow is a boolean which specifies if links should be followed from each response extracted with this rule. If
callback is None follow defaults to True, otherwise it defaults to False.
process_links is a callable, or a string (in which case a method from the spider object with that name
will be used) which will be called for each list of links extracted from each response using the specified
link_extractor. This is mainly used for filtering purposes.

process_request is a callable, or a string (in which case a method from the spider object with that name
will be used) which will be called with every request extracted by this rule, and must return a request or None
(to filter out the request).
CrawlSpider example
Lets now take a look at an example CrawlSpider with rules:

import scrapy
from scrapy.spiders import CrawlSpider, Rule
from scrapy.linkextractors import LinkExtractor
class MySpider(CrawlSpider):
start_urls = ['http://www.example.com']
rules = (
# Extract links matching 'category.php' (but not matching 'subsection.php')
# and follow links from them (since no callback means follow=True by default).
Rule(LinkExtractor(allow=('category\.php', ), deny=('subsection\.php', ))),
# Extract links matching 'item.php' and parse them with the spider's method parse_item
Rule(LinkExtractor(allow=('item\.php', )), callback='parse_item'),
)
def parse_item(self, response):

self.logger.info('Hi, this is an item page! %s', response.url)
item = scrapy.Item()
item['id'] = response.xpath('//td[@id="item_id"]/text()').re(r'ID: (\d+)')
item['name'] = response.xpath('//td[@id="item_name"]/text()').extract()
item['description'] = response.xpath('//td[@id="item_description"]/text()').extract()
return item
This spider would start crawling example.coms home page, collecting category links, and item links, parsing the latter
with the parse_item method. For each item response, some data will be extracted from the HTML using XPath,
and an Item will be filled with it.
XMLFeedSpider
class scrapy.spiders.XMLFeedSpider
XMLFeedSpider is designed for parsing XML feeds by iterating through them by a certain node name. The
iterator can be chosen from: iternodes, xml, and html. Its recommended to use the iternodes iterator
for performance reasons, since the xml and html iterators generate the whole DOM at once in order to parse
it. However, using html as the iterator may be useful when parsing XML with bad markup.
To set the iterator and the tag name, you must define the following class attributes:
iterator
A string which defines the iterator to use. It can be either:
iternodes - a fast iterator based on regular expressions
html - an iterator which uses Selector. Keep in mind this uses DOM parsing and must load
all DOM in memory which could be a problem for big feeds
xml - an iterator which uses Selector. Keep in mind this uses DOM parsing and must load all
DOM in memory which could be a problem for big feeds
3.2. Spiders 35
It defaults to: iternodes.

itertag
A string with the name of the node (or element) to iterate in. Example:
itertag = 'product'
namespaces
A list of (prefix, uri) tuples which define the namespaces available in that document that will be
processed with this spider. The prefix and uri will be used to automatically register namespaces using
the register_namespace() method.
You can then specify nodes with namespaces in the itertag attribute.
Example:
class YourSpider(XMLFeedSpider):
namespaces = [('n', 'http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9')]

itertag = 'n:url'
# ...
Apart from these new attributes, this spider has the following overrideable methods too:
adapt_response(response)
A method that receives the response as soon as it arrives from the spider middleware, before the spider
starts parsing it. It can be used to modify the response body before parsing it. This method receives a
response and also returns a response (it could be the same or another one).
parse_node(response, selector)
This method is called for the nodes matching the provided tag name (itertag). Receives the response
and an Selector for each node. Overriding this method is mandatory. Otherwise, you spider wont
work. This method must return either a Item object, a Request object, or an iterable containing any of
them.
process_results(response, results)
This method is called for each result (item or request) returned by the spider, and its intended to perform
any last time processing required before returning the results to the framework core, for example setting
the item IDs. It receives a list of results and the response which originated those results. It must return a
list of results (Items or Requests).
XMLFeedSpider example
These spiders are pretty easy to use, lets have a look at one example:
from scrapy.spiders import XMLFeedSpider
from myproject.items import TestItem
class MySpider(XMLFeedSpider):
start_urls = ['http://www.example.com/feed.xml']
iterator = 'iternodes' # This is actually unnecessary, since it's the default value
itertag = 'item'
def parse_node(self, response, node):

self.logger.info('Hi, this is a <%s> node!: %s', self.itertag, ''.join(node.extract()))
item = TestItem()

item['id'] = node.xpath('@id').extract()
item['name'] = node.xpath('name').extract()
item['description'] = node.xpath('description').extract()
return item
Basically what we did up there was to create a spider that downloads a feed from the given start_urls, and then
iterates through each of its item tags, prints them out, and stores some random data in an Item.
CSVFeedSpider
class scrapy.spiders.CSVFeedSpider
This spider is very similar to the XMLFeedSpider, except that it iterates over rows, instead of nodes. The method
that gets called in each iteration is parse_row().
delimiter
A string with the separator character for each field in the CSV file Defaults to , (comma).
quotechar
A string with the enclosure character for each field in the CSV file Defaults to " (quotation mark).
headers
A list of the rows contained in the file CSV feed which will be used to extract fields from it.
parse_row(response, row)
Receives a response and a dict (representing each row) with a key for each provided (or detected)
header of the CSV file. This spider also gives the opportunity to override adapt_response and
process_results methods for pre- and post-processing purposes.
CSVFeedSpider example
Lets see an example similar to the previous one, but using a CSVFeedSpider:
from scrapy.spiders import CSVFeedSpider
from myproject.items import TestItem
class MySpider(CSVFeedSpider):
start_urls = ['http://www.example.com/feed.csv']
delimiter = ';'
quotechar = "'"
headers = ['id', 'name', 'description']
def parse_row(self, response, row):

self.logger.info('Hi, this is a row!: %r', row)
item = TestItem()
item['id'] = row['id']
item['name'] = row['name']
item['description'] = row['description']
return item
SitemapSpider
class scrapy.spiders.SitemapSpider
SitemapSpider allows you to crawl a site by discovering the URLs using Sitemaps.
3.2. Spiders 37
It supports nested sitemaps and discovering sitemap urls from robots.txt.

sitemap_urls
A list of urls pointing to the sitemaps whose urls you want to crawl.
You can also point to a robots.txt and it will be parsed to extract sitemap urls from it.
sitemap_rules
A list of tuples (regex, callback) where:
regex is a regular expression to match urls extracted from sitemaps. regex can be either a str or a
compiled regex object.
callback is the callback to use for processing the urls that match the regular expression. callback
can be a string (indicating the name of a spider method) or a callable.
For example:
sitemap_rules = [('/product/', 'parse_product')]
Rules are applied in order, and only the first one that matches will be used.
If you omit this attribute, all urls found in sitemaps will be processed with the parse callback.
sitemap_follow
A list of regexes of sitemap that should be followed. This is is only for sites that use Sitemap index files
that point to other sitemap files.
By default, all sitemaps are followed.
sitemap_alternate_links
Specifies if alternate links for one url should be followed. These are links for the same website in another
language passed within the same url block.
For example:
<url>
<loc>http://example.com/</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="http://example.com/de"/>
</url>
With sitemap_alternate_links set, this would retrieve both URLs. With

sitemap_alternate_links disabled, only http://example.com/ would be retrieved.
Default is sitemap_alternate_links disabled.
SitemapSpider examples
Simplest example: process all urls discovered through sitemaps using the parse callback:
from scrapy.spiders import SitemapSpider
class MySpider(SitemapSpider):
sitemap_urls = ['http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml']

pass # ... scrape item here ...
Process some urls with certain callback and other urls with a different callback:

sitemap_urls = ['http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml']
sitemap_rules = [
('/product/', 'parse_product'),
('/category/', 'parse_category'),
]
def parse_product(self, response):

pass # ... scrape product ...
def parse_category(self, response):

pass # ... scrape category ...
Follow sitemaps defined in the robots.txt file and only follow sitemaps whose url contains /sitemap_shop:
sitemap_urls = ['http://www.example.com/robots.txt']
sitemap_rules = [
('/shop/', 'parse_shop'),
]
sitemap_follow = ['/sitemap_shops']
def parse_shop(self, response):

pass # ... scrape shop here ...
Combine SitemapSpider with other sources of urls:

sitemap_urls = ['http://www.example.com/robots.txt']
sitemap_rules = [
('/shop/', 'parse_shop'),
]
other_urls = ['http://www.example.com/about']
requests = list(super(MySpider, self).start_requests())
requests += [scrapy.Request(x, self.parse_other) for x in self.other_urls]
return requests
def parse_shop(self, response):

pass # ... scrape shop here ...
def parse_other(self, response):

pass # ... scrape other here ...
3.3 Selectors
When youre scraping web pages, the most common task you need to perform is to extract data from the HTML source.
There are several libraries available to achieve this:
3.3. Selectors 39
BeautifulSoup is a very popular web scraping library among Python programmers which constructs a Python
object based on the structure of the HTML code and also deals with bad markup reasonably well, but it has one
drawback: its slow.
lxml is an XML parsing library (which also parses HTML) with a pythonic API based on ElementTree. (lxml is
not part of the Python standard library.)
Scrapy comes with its own mechanism for extracting data. Theyre called selectors because they select certain parts
of the HTML document specified either by XPath or CSS expressions.
XPath is a language for selecting nodes in XML documents, which can also be used with HTML. CSS is a language
for applying styles to HTML documents. It defines selectors to associate those styles with specific HTML elements.
Scrapy selectors are built over the lxml library, which means theyre very similar in speed and parsing accuracy.
This page explains how selectors work and describes their API which is very small and simple, unlike the lxml API
which is much bigger because the lxml library can be used for many other tasks, besides selecting markup documents.
For a complete reference of the selectors API see Selector reference
3.3.1 Using selectors
Constructing selectors
Scrapy selectors are instances of Selector class constructed by passing text or TextResponse object. It auto-
matically chooses the best parsing rules (XML vs HTML) based on input type:
>>> from scrapy.selector import Selector
>>> from scrapy.http import HtmlResponse
Constructing from text:

>>> body = '<html><body><span>good</span></body></html>'
>>> Selector(text=body).xpath('//span/text()').extract()
[u'good']
Constructing from response:

>>> response = HtmlResponse(url='http://example.com', body=body)
>>> Selector(response=response).xpath('//span/text()').extract()
[u'good']
For convenience, response objects expose a selector on .selector attribute, its totally OK to use this shortcut when
possible:
>>> response.selector.xpath('//span/text()').extract()
[u'good']
Using selectors
To explain how to use the selectors well use the Scrapy shell (which provides interactive testing) and an example page
located in the Scrapy documentation server:
http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/_static/selectors-sample1.html
Heres its HTML code:

<html>
<head>
<base href='http://example.com/' />
<title>Example website</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id='images'>
<a href='image1.html'>Name: My image 1 <br /><img src='image1_thumb.jpg' /></a>
</div>
</body>
</html>
First, lets open the shell:

scrapy shell http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/_static/selectors-sample1.html
Then, after the shell loads, youll have the response available as response shell variable, and its attached selector in
response.selector attribute.
Since were dealing with HTML, the selector will automatically use an HTML parser.
So, by looking at the HTML code of that page, lets construct an XPath for selecting the text inside the title tag:
>>> response.selector.xpath('//title/text()')
[<Selector (text) xpath=//title/text()>]
Querying responses using XPath and CSS is so common that responses include two convenience shortcuts:
response.xpath() and response.css():
>>> response.xpath('//title/text()')
>>> response.css('title::text')
As you can see, .xpath() and .css() methods return a SelectorList instance, which is a list of new selectors.
This API can be used for quickly selecting nested data:
>>> response.css('img').xpath('@src').extract()
[u'image1_thumb.jpg',
u'image2_thumb.jpg',
u'image5_thumb.jpg']
To actually extract the textual data, you must call the selector .extract() method, as follows:
>>> response.xpath('//title/text()').extract()
[u'Example website']
If you want to extract only first matched element, you can call the selector .extract_first()
>>> response.xpath('//div[@id="images"]/a/text()').extract_first()
u'Name: My image 1 '
It returns None if no element was found:
3.3. Selectors 41
>>> response.xpath('//div[@id="not-exists"]/text()').extract_first() is None

True
A default return value can be provided as an argument, to be used instead of None:

>>> response.xpath('//div[@id="not-exists"]/text()').extract_first(default='not-found')
'not-found'
Notice that CSS selectors can select text or attribute nodes using CSS3 pseudo-elements:
>>> response.css('title::text').extract()
[u'Example website']
Now were going to get the base URL and some image links:
>>> response.xpath('//base/@href').extract()
[u'http://example.com/']
>>> response.css('base::attr(href)').extract()
[u'http://example.com/']
>>> response.xpath('//a[contains(@href, "image")]/@href').extract()

[u'image1.html',
u'image2.html',
u'image3.html',
u'image4.html',
u'image5.html']
>>> response.css('a[href*=image]::attr(href)').extract()
[u'image1.html',
u'image2.html',
u'image3.html',
u'image4.html',
u'image5.html']
>>> response.xpath('//a[contains(@href, "image")]/img/@src').extract()

>>> response.css('a[href*=image] img::attr(src)').extract()

Nesting selectors
The selection methods (.xpath() or .css()) return a list of selectors of the same type, so you can call the selection
methods for those selectors too. Heres an example:
>>> links = response.xpath('//a[contains(@href, "image")]')
>>> links.extract()
[u'<a href="image1.html">Name: My image 1 <br><img src="image1_thumb.jpg"></a>',
u'<a href="image2.html">Name: My image 2 <br><img src="image2_thumb.jpg"></a>',


u'<a href="image5.html">Name: My image 5 <br><img src="image5_thumb.jpg"></a>']
>>> for index, link in enumerate(links):

... args = (index, link.xpath('@href').extract(), link.xpath('img/@src').extract())
... print 'Link number %d points to url %s and image %s' % args
Link number 0 points to url [u'image1.html'] and image [u'image1_thumb.jpg']

Using selectors with regular expressions
Selector also has a .re() method for extracting data using regular expressions. However, unlike using
.xpath() or .css() methods, .re() returns a list of unicode strings. So you cant construct nested .re()
calls.
Heres an example used to extract image names from the HTML code above:
>>> response.xpath('//a[contains(@href, "image")]/text()').re(r'Name:\s*(.*)')
[u'My image 1',
u'My image 2',
u'My image 3',
u'My image 4',
u'My image 5']
Theres an additional helper reciprocating .extract_first() for .re(), named .re_first(). Use it to
extract just the first matching string:
>>> response.xpath('//a[contains(@href, "image")]/text()').re_first(r'Name:\s*(.*)')
u'My image 1'
Working with relative XPaths
Keep in mind that if you are nesting selectors and use an XPath that starts with /, that XPath will be absolute to the
document and not relative to the Selector youre calling it from.
For example, suppose you want to extract all <p> elements inside <div> elements. First, you would get all <div>
elements:
>>> divs = response.xpath('//div')
At first, you may be tempted to use the following approach, which is wrong, as it actually extracts all <p> elements
from the document, not only those inside <div> elements:
>>> for p in divs.xpath('//p'): # this is wrong - gets all <p> from the whole document
... print p.extract()
This is the proper way to do it (note the dot prefixing the .//p XPath):
>>> for p in divs.xpath('.//p'): # extracts all <p> inside
Another common case would be to extract all direct <p> children:
3.3. Selectors 43
>>> for p in divs.xpath('p'):

For more details about relative XPaths see the Location Paths section in the XPath specification.
Variables in XPath expressions
XPath allows you to reference variables in your XPath expressions, using the $somevariable syntax. This is some-
what similar to parameterized queries or prepared statements in the SQL world where you replace some arguments in
your queries with placeholders like ?, which are then substituted with values passed with the query.
Heres an example to match an element based on its id attribute value, without hard-coding it (that was shown
previously):
>>> # `$val` used in the expression, a `val` argument needs to be passed
>>> response.xpath('//div[@id=$val]/a/text()', val='images').extract_first()
u'Name: My image 1 '
Heres another example, to find the id attribute of a <div> tag containing five <a> children (here we pass the value
5 as an integer):
>>> response.xpath('//div[count(a)=$cnt]/@id', cnt=5).extract_first()
u'images'
All variable references must have a binding value when calling .xpath() (otherwise youll get a ValueError:
XPath error: exception). This is done by passing as many named arguments as necessary.
parsel, the library powering Scrapy selectors, has more details and examples on XPath variables.
Using EXSLT extensions
Being built atop lxml, Scrapy selectors also support some EXSLT extensions and come with these pre-registered
namespaces to use in XPath expressions:
prefix namespace usage
re http://exslt.org/regular-expressions regular expressions
set http://exslt.org/sets set manipulation
Regular expressions
The test() function, for example, can prove quite useful when XPaths starts-with() or contains() are
not sufficient.
Example selecting links in list item with a class attribute ending with a digit:
>>> from scrapy import Selector
>>> doc = """
... <div>
... <ul>
... <li class="item-0"><a href="link1.html">first item</a></li>
... <li class="item-1"><a href="link2.html">second item</a></li>
... <li class="item-inactive"><a href="link3.html">third item</a></li>
... <li class="item-1"><a href="link4.html">fourth item</a></li>
... <li class="item-0"><a href="link5.html">fifth item</a></li>
... </ul>
... </div>

... """
>>> sel = Selector(text=doc, type="html")
>>> sel.xpath('//li//@href').extract()
[u'link1.html', u'link2.html', u'link3.html', u'link4.html', u'link5.html']
>>> sel.xpath('//li[re:test(@class, "item-\d$")]//@href').extract()
[u'link1.html', u'link2.html', u'link4.html', u'link5.html']
>>>
Warning: C library libxslt doesnt natively support EXSLT regular expressions so lxmls implementation
uses hooks to Pythons re module. Thus, using regexp functions in your XPath expressions may add a small
performance penalty.
Set operations
These can be handy for excluding parts of a document tree before extracting text elements for example.
Example extracting microdata (sample content taken from http://schema.org/Product) with groups of itemscopes and
corresponding itemprops:
>>> doc = """
... <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
... <span itemprop="name">Kenmore White 17" Microwave</span>
... <img src="kenmore-microwave-17in.jpg" alt='Kenmore 17" Microwave' />
... <div itemprop="aggregateRating"
... itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
... Rated <span itemprop="ratingValue">3.5</span>/5
... based on <span itemprop="reviewCount">11</span> customer reviews
... </div>
...
... <div itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer">
... <span itemprop="price">$55.00</span>
... <link itemprop="availability" href="http://schema.org/InStock" />In stock
... </div>
...
... Product description:
... <span itemprop="description">0.7 cubic feet countertop microwave.
... Has six preset cooking categories and convenience features like
... Add-A-Minute and Child Lock.</span>
...
... Customer reviews:
...
... <div itemprop="review" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Review">
... <span itemprop="name">Not a happy camper</span> -
... by <span itemprop="author">Ellie</span>,
... <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2011-04-01">April 1, 2011
... <div itemprop="reviewRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Rating">
... <meta itemprop="worstRating" content = "1">
... <span itemprop="ratingValue">1</span>/
... <span itemprop="bestRating">5</span>stars
... </div>
... <span itemprop="description">The lamp burned out and now I have to replace
... it. </span>
... </div>
...
... <div itemprop="review" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Review">
... <span itemprop="name">Value purchase</span> -
3.3. Selectors 45
... by <span itemprop="author">Lucas</span>,

... <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2011-03-25">March 25, 2011
... <div itemprop="reviewRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Rating">
... <meta itemprop="worstRating" content = "1"/>
... <span itemprop="ratingValue">4</span>/
... <span itemprop="bestRating">5</span>stars
... </div>
... <span itemprop="description">Great microwave for the price. It is small and
... fits in my apartment.</span>
... </div>
... ...
... </div>
... """
>>> sel = Selector(text=doc, type="html")
>>> for scope in sel.xpath('//div[@itemscope]'):
... print "current scope:", scope.xpath('@itemtype').extract()
... props = scope.xpath('''
... set:difference(./descendant::*/@itemprop,
... .//*[@itemscope]/*/@itemprop)''')
... print " properties:", props.extract()
... print
current scope: [u'http://schema.org/Product']

properties: [u'name', u'aggregateRating', u'offers', u'description', u'review', u'review']
current scope: [u'http://schema.org/AggregateRating']

properties: [u'ratingValue', u'reviewCount']
current scope: [u'http://schema.org/Offer']

properties: [u'price', u'availability']
current scope: [u'http://schema.org/Review']

properties: [u'name', u'author', u'datePublished', u'reviewRating', u'description']
current scope: [u'http://schema.org/Rating']

properties: [u'worstRating', u'ratingValue', u'bestRating']
current scope: [u'http://schema.org/Review']

properties: [u'name', u'author', u'datePublished', u'reviewRating', u'description']
current scope: [u'http://schema.org/Rating']

properties: [u'worstRating', u'ratingValue', u'bestRating']
>>>
Here we first iterate over itemscope elements, and for each one, we look for all itemprops elements and exclude
those that are themselves inside another itemscope.
Some XPath tips
Here are some tips that you may find useful when using XPath with Scrapy selectors, based on this post from Scrap-
ingHubs blog. If you are not much familiar with XPath yet, you may want to take a look first at this XPath tutorial.

Using text nodes in a condition
When you need to use the text content as argument to an XPath string function, avoid using .//text() and use just
. instead.
This is because the expression .//text() yields a collection of text elements a node-set. And when a node-
set is converted to a string, which happens when it is passed as argument to a string function like contains() or
starts-with(), it results in the text for the first element only.
Example:
>>> sel = Selector(text='<a href="#">Click here to go to the <strong>Next Page</strong></a>')
Converting a node-set to string:

>>> sel.xpath('//a//text()').extract() # take a peek at the node-set
[u'Click here to go to the ', u'Next Page']
>>> sel.xpath("string(//a[1]//text())").extract() # convert it to string
[u'Click here to go to the ']
A node converted to a string, however, puts together the text of itself plus of all its descendants:
>>> sel.xpath("//a[1]").extract() # select the first node
[u'<a href="#">Click here to go to the <strong>Next Page</strong></a>']
>>> sel.xpath("string(//a[1])").extract() # convert it to string
[u'Click here to go to the Next Page']
So, using the .//text() node-set wont select anything in this case:
>>> sel.xpath("//a[contains(.//text(), 'Next Page')]").extract()
[]
But using the . to mean the node, works:

>>> sel.xpath("//a[contains(., 'Next Page')]").extract()
[u'<a href="#">Click here to go to the <strong>Next Page</strong></a>']
Beware of the difference between //node[1] and (//node)[1]
//node[1] selects all the nodes occurring first under their respective parents.
(//node)[1] selects all the nodes in the document, and then gets only the first of them.
Example:
>>> sel = Selector(text="""
....: <ul class="list">
....: <li>1</li>
....: <li>2</li>
....: <li>3</li>
....: </ul>
....: <ul class="list">
....: <li>4</li>
....: <li>5</li>
....: <li>6</li>
....: </ul>""")
>>> xp = lambda x: sel.xpath(x).extract()
3.3. Selectors 47
This gets all first <li> elements under whatever it is its parent:
>>> xp("//li[1]")
[u'<li>1</li>', u'<li>4</li>']
And this gets the first <li> element in the whole document:
>>> xp("(//li)[1]")
[u'<li>1</li>']
This gets all first <li> elements under an <ul> parent:

>>> xp("//ul/li[1]")
[u'<li>1</li>', u'<li>4</li>']
And this gets the first <li> element under an <ul> parent in the whole document:
>>> xp("(//ul/li)[1]")
[u'<li>1</li>']
When querying by class, consider using CSS
Because an element can contain multiple CSS classes, the XPath way to select elements by class is the rather verbose:
*[contains(concat(' ', normalize-space(@class), ' '), ' someclass ')]
If you use @class=someclass you may end up missing elements that have other classes, and if you just use
contains(@class, someclass) to make up for that you may end up with more elements that you want, if
they have a different class name that shares the string someclass.
As it turns out, Scrapy selectors allow you to chain selectors, so most of the time you can just select by class using
CSS and then switch to XPath when needed:
>>> sel = Selector(text='<div class="hero shout"><time datetime="2014-07-23 19:00">Special date</time
>>> sel.css('.shout').xpath('./time/@datetime').extract()
[u'2014-07-23 19:00']
This is cleaner than using the verbose XPath trick shown above. Just remember to use the . in the XPath expressions
that will follow.
3.3.2 Built-in Selectors reference
class scrapy.selector.Selector(response=None, text=None, type=None)

An instance of Selector is a wrapper over response to select certain parts of its content.
response is an HtmlResponse or an XmlResponse object that will be used for selecting and extracting
data.
text is a unicode string or utf-8 encoded text for cases when a response isnt available. Using text and
response together is undefined behavior.
type defines the selector type, it can be "html", "xml" or None (default).
If type is None, the selector automatically chooses the best type based on response
type (see below), or defaults to "html" in case it is used together with text.
If type is None and a response is passed, the selector type is inferred from the response
type as follows:

"html" for HtmlResponse type

"xml" for XmlResponse type
"html" for anything else
Otherwise, if type is set, the selector type will be forced and no detection will occur.
xpath(query)
Find nodes matching the xpath query and return the result as a SelectorList instance with all ele-
ments flattened. List elements implement Selector interface too.
query is a string containing the XPATH query to apply.
Note: For convenience, this method can be called as response.xpath()
css(query)
Apply the given CSS selector and return a SelectorList instance.
query is a string containing the CSS selector to apply.
In the background, CSS queries are translated into XPath queries using cssselect library and run
.xpath() method.
Note: For convenience this method can be called as response.css()
extract()
Serialize and return the matched nodes as a list of unicode strings. Percent encoded content is unquoted.
re(regex)
Apply the given regex and return a list of unicode strings with the matches.
regex can be either a compiled regular expression or a string which will be compiled to a regular
expression using re.compile(regex)
Note: Note that re() and re_first() both decode HTML entities (except < and &).
register_namespace(prefix, uri)
Register the given namespace to be used in this Selector. Without registering namespaces you cant
select or extract data from non-standard namespaces. See examples below.
remove_namespaces()
Remove all namespaces, allowing to traverse the document using namespace-less xpaths. See example
below.
__nonzero__()
Returns True if there is any real content selected or False otherwise. In other words, the boolean value
of a Selector is given by the contents it selects.
SelectorList objects
class scrapy.selector.SelectorList
The SelectorList class is a subclass of the builtin list class, which provides a few additional methods.
3.3. Selectors 49
xpath(query)
Call the .xpath() method for each element in this list and return their results flattened as another
SelectorList.
query is the same argument as the one in Selector.xpath()
css(query)
Call the .css() method for each element in this list and return their results flattened as another
SelectorList.
query is the same argument as the one in Selector.css()
extract()
Call the .extract() method for each element in this list and return their results flattened, as a list of
unicode strings.
re()
Call the .re() method for each element in this list and return their results flattened, as a list of unicode
strings.
__nonzero__()
returns True if the list is not empty, False otherwise.
Selector examples on HTML response
Heres a couple of Selector examples to illustrate several concepts. In all cases, we assume there is already a
Selector instantiated with a HtmlResponse object like this:
sel = Selector(html_response)
1. Select all <h1> elements from an HTML response body, returning a list of Selector objects (ie. a
SelectorList object):
sel.xpath("//h1")
2. Extract the text of all <h1> elements from an HTML response body, returning a list of unicode strings:
sel.xpath("//h1").extract() # this includes the h1 tag
sel.xpath("//h1/text()").extract() # this excludes the h1 tag
3. Iterate over all <p> tags and print their class attribute:
for node in sel.xpath("//p"):
print node.xpath("@class").extract()
Selector examples on XML response
Heres a couple of examples to illustrate several concepts. In both cases we assume there is already a Selector
instantiated with an XmlResponse object like this:
sel = Selector(xml_response)
1. Select all <product> elements from an XML response body, returning a list of Selector objects (ie. a
SelectorList object):
sel.xpath("//product")
2. Extract all prices from a Google Base XML feed which requires registering a namespace:

sel.register_namespace("g", "http://base.google.com/ns/1.0")
sel.xpath("//g:price").extract()
Removing namespaces
When dealing with scraping projects, it is often quite convenient to get rid of namespaces altogether and just work with
element names, to write more simple/convenient XPaths. You can use the Selector.remove_namespaces()
method for that.
Lets show an example that illustrates this with GitHub blog atom feed.
First, we open the shell with the url we want to scrape:
$ scrapy shell https://github.com/blog.atom
Once in the shell we can try selecting all <link> objects and see that it doesnt work (because the Atom XML
namespace is obfuscating those nodes):
>>> response.xpath("//link")
[]
But once we call the Selector.remove_namespaces() method, all nodes can be accessed directly by their
names:
>>> response.selector.remove_namespaces()
>>> response.xpath("//link")
[<Selector xpath='//link' data=u'<link xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'>,
<Selector xpath='//link' data=u'<link xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'>,
...
If you wonder why the namespace removal procedure isnt always called by default instead of having to call it manu-
ally, this is because of two reasons, which, in order of relevance, are:
1. Removing namespaces requires to iterate and modify all nodes in the document, which is a reasonably expensive
operation to perform for all documents crawled by Scrapy
2. There could be some cases where using namespaces is actually required, in case some element names clash
between namespaces. These cases are very rare though.
3.4 Items
The main goal in scraping is to extract structured data from unstructured sources, typically, web pages. Scrapy spiders
can return the extracted data as Python dicts. While convenient and familiar, Python dicts lack structure: it is easy to
make a typo in a field name or return inconsistent data, especially in a larger project with many spiders.
To define common output data format Scrapy provides the Item class. Item objects are simple containers used to
collect the scraped data. They provide a dictionary-like API with a convenient syntax for declaring their available
fields.
Various Scrapy components use extra information provided by Items: exporters look at declared fields to figure out
columns to export, serialization can be customized using Item fields metadata, trackref tracks Item instances to
help finding memory leaks (see Debugging memory leaks with trackref ), etc.
3.4. Items 51
3.4.1 Declaring Items
Items are declared using a simple class definition syntax and Field objects. Here is an example:
import scrapy
class Product(scrapy.Item):
price = scrapy.Field()
stock = scrapy.Field()
last_updated = scrapy.Field(serializer=str)
Note: Those familiar with Django will notice that Scrapy Items are declared similar to Django Models, except that
Scrapy Items are much simpler as there is no concept of different field types.
3.4.2 Item Fields
Field objects are used to specify metadata for each field. For example, the serializer function for the
last_updated field illustrated in the example above.
You can specify any kind of metadata for each field. There is no restriction on the values accepted by Field objects.
For this same reason, there is no reference list of all available metadata keys. Each key defined in Field objects
could be used by a different component, and only those components know about it. You can also define and use any
other Field key in your project too, for your own needs. The main goal of Field objects is to provide a way to
define all field metadata in one place. Typically, those components whose behaviour depends on each field use certain
field keys to configure that behaviour. You must refer to their documentation to see which metadata keys are used by
each component.
Its important to note that the Field objects used to declare the item do not stay assigned as class attributes. Instead,
they can be accessed through the Item.fields attribute.
3.4.3 Working with Items
Here are some examples of common tasks performed with items, using the Product item declared above. You will
notice the API is very similar to the dict API.
Creating items
>>> product = Product(name='Desktop PC', price=1000)

>>> print product
Product(name='Desktop PC', price=1000)
Getting field values
>>> product['name']
Desktop PC
>>> product.get('name')
Desktop PC
>>> product['price']
1000

>>> product['last_updated']
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
KeyError: 'last_updated'
>>> product.get('last_updated', 'not set')

not set
>>> product['lala'] # getting unknown field

...
KeyError: 'lala'
>>> product.get('lala', 'unknown field')

'unknown field'
>>> 'name' in product # is name field populated?

True
>>> 'last_updated' in product # is last_updated populated?

False
>>> 'last_updated' in product.fields # is last_updated a declared field?

True
>>> 'lala' in product.fields # is lala a declared field?

False
Setting field values
>>> product['last_updated'] = 'today'

>>> product['last_updated']
today
>>> product['lala'] = 'test' # setting unknown field

...
KeyError: 'Product does not support field: lala'
Accessing all populated values
To access all populated values, just use the typical dict API:
>>> product.keys()
['price', 'name']
>>> product.items()
[('price', 1000), ('name', 'Desktop PC')]
Other common tasks
Copying items:
3.4. Items 53
>>> product2 = Product(product)

>>> print product2
>>> product3 = product2.copy()

>>> print product3
Creating dicts from items:

>>> dict(product) # create a dict from all populated values
{'price': 1000, 'name': 'Desktop PC'}
Creating items from dicts:

>>> Product({'name': 'Laptop PC', 'price': 1500})
Product(price=1500, name='Laptop PC')
>>> Product({'name': 'Laptop PC', 'lala': 1500}) # warning: unknown field in dict
...
KeyError: 'Product does not support field: lala'
3.4.4 Extending Items
You can extend Items (to add more fields or to change some metadata for some fields) by declaring a subclass of your
original Item.
For example:
class DiscountedProduct(Product):
discount_percent = scrapy.Field(serializer=str)
discount_expiration_date = scrapy.Field()
You can also extend field metadata by using the previous field metadata and appending more values, or changing
existing values, like this:
class SpecificProduct(Product):
name = scrapy.Field(Product.fields['name'], serializer=my_serializer)
That adds (or replaces) the serializer metadata key for the name field, keeping all the previously existing meta-
data values.
3.4.5 Item objects
class scrapy.item.Item([arg ])
Return a new Item optionally initialized from the given argument.
Items replicate the standard dict API, including its constructor. The only additional attribute provided by Items
is:
fields
A dictionary containing all declared fields for this Item, not only those populated. The keys are the field
names and the values are the Field objects used in the Item declaration.

3.4.6 Field objects
class scrapy.item.Field([arg ])
The Field class is just an alias to the built-in dict class and doesnt provide any extra functionality or at-
tributes. In other words, Field objects are plain-old Python dicts. A separate class is used to support the item
declaration syntax based on class attributes.
3.5 Item Loaders
Item Loaders provide a convenient mechanism for populating scraped Items. Even though Items can be populated
using their own dictionary-like API, Item Loaders provide a much more convenient API for populating them from a
scraping process, by automating some common tasks like parsing the raw extracted data before assigning it.
In other words, Items provide the container of scraped data, while Item Loaders provide the mechanism for populating
that container.
Item Loaders are designed to provide a flexible, efficient and easy mechanism for extending and overriding different
field parsing rules, either by spider, or by source format (HTML, XML, etc) without becoming a nightmare to maintain.
3.5.1 Using Item Loaders to populate items
To use an Item Loader, you must first instantiate it. You can either instantiate it with a dict-like object (e.g. Item or
dict) or without one, in which case an Item is automatically instantiated in the Item Loader constructor using the Item
class specified in the ItemLoader.default_item_class attribute.
Then, you start collecting values into the Item Loader, typically using Selectors. You can add more than one value to
the same item field; the Item Loader will know how to join those values later using a proper processing function.
Here is a typical Item Loader usage in a Spider, using the Product item declared in the Items chapter:
from scrapy.loader import ItemLoader
from myproject.items import Product

l = ItemLoader(item=Product(), response=response)
l.add_xpath('name', '//div[@class="product_name"]')
l.add_xpath('name', '//div[@class="product_title"]')
l.add_xpath('price', '//p[@id="price"]')
l.add_css('stock', 'p#stock]')
l.add_value('last_updated', 'today') # you can also use literal values
return l.load_item()
By quickly looking at that code, we can see the name field is being extracted from two different XPath locations in
the page:
1. //div[@class="product_name"]
2. //div[@class="product_title"]
In other words, data is being collected by extracting it from two XPath locations, using the add_xpath() method.
This is the data that will be assigned to the name field later.
Afterwards, similar calls are used for price and stock fields (the latter using a CSS selector with the add_css()
method), and finally the last_update field is populated directly with a literal value (today) using a different
method: add_value().
3.5. Item Loaders 55

Finally, when all data is collected, the ItemLoader.load_item() method is called which actually returns
the item populated with the data previously extracted and collected with the add_xpath(), add_css(), and
add_value() calls.
3.5.2 Input and Output processors
An Item Loader contains one input processor and one output processor for each (item) field. The input processor
processes the extracted data as soon as its received (through the add_xpath(), add_css() or add_value()
methods) and the result of the input processor is collected and kept inside the ItemLoader. After collecting all data,
the ItemLoader.load_item() method is called to populate and get the populated Item object. Thats when the
output processor is called with the data previously collected (and processed using the input processor). The result of
the output processor is the final value that gets assigned to the item.
Lets see an example to illustrate how the input and output processors are called for a particular field (the same applies
for any other field):
l = ItemLoader(Product(), some_selector)
l.add_xpath('name', xpath1) # (1)
l.add_xpath('name', xpath2) # (2)
l.add_css('name', css) # (3)
l.add_value('name', 'test') # (4)
return l.load_item() # (5)
So what happens is:

1. Data from xpath1 is extracted, and passed through the input processor of the name field. The result of the
input processor is collected and kept in the Item Loader (but not yet assigned to the item).
2. Data from xpath2 is extracted, and passed through the same input processor used in (1). The result of the
input processor is appended to the data collected in (1) (if any).
3. This case is similar to the previous ones, except that the data is extracted from the css CSS selector, and passed
through the same input processor used in (1) and (2). The result of the input processor is appended to the data
collected in (1) and (2) (if any).
4. This case is also similar to the previous ones, except that the value to be collected is assigned directly, instead of
being extracted from a XPath expression or a CSS selector. However, the value is still passed through the input
processors. In this case, since the value is not iterable it is converted to an iterable of a single element before
passing it to the input processor, because input processor always receive iterables.
5. The data collected in steps (1), (2), (3) and (4) is passed through the output processor of the name field. The
result of the output processor is the value assigned to the name field in the item.
Its worth noticing that processors are just callable objects, which are called with the data to be parsed, and return a
parsed value. So you can use any function as input or output processor. The only requirement is that they must accept
one (and only one) positional argument, which will be an iterator.
Note: Both input and output processors must receive an iterator as their first argument. The output of those functions
can be anything. The result of input processors will be appended to an internal list (in the Loader) containing the
collected values (for that field). The result of the output processors is the value that will be finally assigned to the item.
The other thing you need to keep in mind is that the values returned by input processors are collected internally (in
lists) and then passed to output processors to populate the fields.
Last, but not least, Scrapy comes with some commonly used processors built-in for convenience.

3.5.3 Declaring Item Loaders
Item Loaders are declared like Items, by using a class definition syntax. Here is an example:
from scrapy.loader import ItemLoader
from scrapy.loader.processors import TakeFirst, MapCompose, Join
class ProductLoader(ItemLoader):
default_output_processor = TakeFirst()
name_in = MapCompose(unicode.title)
name_out = Join()
price_in = MapCompose(unicode.strip)
# ...
As you can see, input processors are declared using the _in suffix while output processors are de-
clared using the _out suffix. And you can also declare a default input/output processors using
the ItemLoader.default_input_processor and ItemLoader.default_output_processor at-
tributes.
3.5.4 Declaring Input and Output Processors
As seen in the previous section, input and output processors can be declared in the Item Loader definition, and its
very common to declare input processors this way. However, there is one more place where you can specify the input
and output processors to use: in the Item Field metadata. Here is an example:
import scrapy
from scrapy.loader.processors import Join, MapCompose, TakeFirst
from w3lib.html import remove_tags
def filter_price(value):
if value.isdigit():
return value
name = scrapy.Field(
input_processor=MapCompose(remove_tags),
output_processor=Join(),
)
price = scrapy.Field(
input_processor=MapCompose(remove_tags, filter_price),
output_processor=TakeFirst(),
)
>>> from scrapy.loader import ItemLoader

>>> il = ItemLoader(item=Product())
>>> il.add_value('name', [u'Welcome to my', u'<strong>website</strong>'])
>>> il.add_value('price', [u'€', u'<span>1000</span>'])
>>> il.load_item()
{'name': u'Welcome to my website', 'price': u'1000'}
The precedence order, for both input and output processors, is as follows:
1. Item Loader field-specific attributes: field_in and field_out (most precedence)

2. Field metadata (input_processor and output_processor key)

3. Item Loader defaults: ItemLoader.default_input_processor() and
ItemLoader.default_output_processor() (least precedence)
See also: Reusing and extending Item Loaders.
3.5.5 Item Loader Context
The Item Loader Context is a dict of arbitrary key/values which is shared among all input and output processors in
the Item Loader. It can be passed when declaring, instantiating or using Item Loader. They are used to modify the
behaviour of the input/output processors.
For example, suppose you have a function parse_length which receives a text value and extracts a length from it:
def parse_length(text, loader_context):
unit = loader_context.get('unit', 'm')
# ... length parsing code goes here ...
return parsed_length
By accepting a loader_context argument the function is explicitly telling the Item Loader that its able to receive
an Item Loader context, so the Item Loader passes the currently active context when calling it, and the processor
function (parse_length in this case) can thus use them.
There are several ways to modify Item Loader context values:
1. By modifying the currently active Item Loader context (context attribute):
loader = ItemLoader(product)
loader.context['unit'] = 'cm'
2. On Item Loader instantiation (the keyword arguments of Item Loader constructor are stored in the Item Loader
context):
loader = ItemLoader(product, unit='cm')
3. On Item Loader declaration, for those input/output processors that support instantiating them with an Item
Loader context. MapCompose is one of them:
class ProductLoader(ItemLoader):
length_out = MapCompose(parse_length, unit='cm')
3.5.6 ItemLoader objects
class scrapy.loader.ItemLoader([item, selector, response ], **kwargs)

Return a new Item Loader for populating the given Item. If no item is given, one is instantiated automatically
using the class in default_item_class.
When instantiated with a selector or a response parameters the ItemLoader class provides convenient mech-
anisms for extracting data from web pages using selectors.
Parameters
item (Item object) The item instance to populate using subsequent calls to
add_xpath(), add_css(), or add_value().
selector (Selector object) The selector to extract data from, when using the
add_xpath() (resp. add_css()) or replace_xpath() (resp. replace_css())
method.

response (Response object) The response used to construct the selector using the
default_selector_class, unless the selector argument is given, in which case this
argument is ignored.
The item, selector, response and the remaining keyword arguments are assigned to the Loader context (accessible
through the context attribute).
ItemLoader instances have the following methods:
get_value(value, *processors, **kwargs)
Process the given value by the given processors and keyword arguments.
Available keyword arguments:
Parameters re (str or compiled regex) a regular expression to use for extracting
data from the given value using extract_regex() method, applied before processors
Examples:
>>> from scrapy.loader.processors import TakeFirst
>>> loader.get_value(u'name: foo', TakeFirst(), unicode.upper, re='name: (.+)')
'FOO`
add_value(field_name, value, *processors, **kwargs)

Process and then add the given value for the given field.
The value is first passed through get_value() by giving the processors and kwargs, and then
passed through the field input processor and its result appended to the data collected for that field. If the
field already contains collected data, the new data is added.
The given field_name can be None, in which case values for multiple fields may be added. And the
processed value should be a dict with field_name mapped to values.
Examples:
loader.add_value('name', u'Color TV')
loader.add_value('colours', [u'white', u'blue'])
loader.add_value('length', u'100')
loader.add_value('name', u'name: foo', TakeFirst(), re='name: (.+)')
loader.add_value(None, {'name': u'foo', 'sex': u'male'})
replace_value(field_name, value, *processors, **kwargs)

Similar to add_value() but replaces the collected data with the new value instead of adding it.
get_xpath(xpath, *processors, **kwargs)
Similar to ItemLoader.get_value() but receives an XPath instead of a value, which is used to
extract a list of unicode strings from the selector associated with this ItemLoader.
Parameters
xpath (str) the XPath to extract data from
re (str or compiled regex) a regular expression to use for extracting data from
the selected XPath region
Examples:
# HTML snippet: <p class="product-name">Color TV</p>
loader.get_xpath('//p[@class="product-name"]')
# HTML snippet: <p id="price">the price is $1200</p>
loader.get_xpath('//p[@id="price"]', TakeFirst(), re='the price is (.*)')

add_xpath(field_name, xpath, *processors, **kwargs)

Similar to ItemLoader.add_value() but receives an XPath instead of a value, which is used to
extract a list of unicode strings from the selector associated with this ItemLoader.
See get_xpath() for kwargs.
Parameters xpath (str) the XPath to extract data from
Examples:
loader.add_xpath('name', '//p[@class="product-name"]')
loader.add_xpath('price', '//p[@id="price"]', re='the price is (.*)')
replace_xpath(field_name, xpath, *processors, **kwargs)

Similar to add_xpath() but replaces collected data instead of adding it.
get_css(css, *processors, **kwargs)
Similar to ItemLoader.get_value() but receives a CSS selector instead of a value, which is used
to extract a list of unicode strings from the selector associated with this ItemLoader.
Parameters
css (str) the CSS selector to extract data from
re (str or compiled regex) a regular expression to use for extracting data from
the selected CSS region
Examples:
loader.get_css('p.product-name')
loader.get_css('p#price', TakeFirst(), re='the price is (.*)')
add_css(field_name, css, *processors, **kwargs)

Similar to ItemLoader.add_value() but receives a CSS selector instead of a value, which is used
to extract a list of unicode strings from the selector associated with this ItemLoader.
See get_css() for kwargs.
Parameters css (str) the CSS selector to extract data from
Examples:
loader.add_css('name', 'p.product-name')
loader.add_css('price', 'p#price', re='the price is (.*)')
replace_css(field_name, css, *processors, **kwargs)

Similar to add_css() but replaces collected data instead of adding it.
load_item()
Populate the item with the data collected so far, and return it. The data collected is first passed through the
output processors to get the final value to assign to each item field.
nested_xpath(xpath)
Create a nested loader with an xpath selector. The supplied selector is applied relative to selector associated
with this ItemLoader. The nested loader shares the Item with the parent ItemLoader so calls to
add_xpath(), add_value(), replace_value(), etc. will behave as expected.

nested_css(css)
Create a nested loader with a css selector. The supplied selector is applied relative to selector associated
with this ItemLoader. The nested loader shares the Item with the parent ItemLoader so calls to
add_xpath(), add_value(), replace_value(), etc. will behave as expected.
get_collected_values(field_name)
Return the collected values for the given field.
get_output_value(field_name)
Return the collected values parsed using the output processor, for the given field. This method doesnt
populate or modify the item at all.
get_input_processor(field_name)
Return the input processor for the given field.
get_output_processor(field_name)
Return the output processor for the given field.
ItemLoader instances have the following attributes:
item
The Item object being parsed by this Item Loader.
context
The currently active Context of this Item Loader.
default_item_class
An Item class (or factory), used to instantiate items when not given in the constructor.
default_input_processor
The default input processor to use for those fields which dont specify one.
default_output_processor
The default output processor to use for those fields which dont specify one.
default_selector_class
The class used to construct the selector of this ItemLoader, if only a response is given in the
constructor. If a selector is given in the constructor this attribute is ignored. This attribute is sometimes
overridden in subclasses.
selector
The Selector object to extract data from. Its either the selector given in the constructor or one created
from the response given in the constructor using the default_selector_class. This attribute is
meant to be read-only.
3.5.7 Nested Loaders
When parsing related values from a subsection of a document, it can be useful to create nested loaders. Imagine youre
extracting details from a footer of a page that looks something like:
Example:
<footer>
<a class="social" href="http://facebook.com/whatever">Like Us</a>
<a class="social" href="http://twitter.com/whatever">Follow Us</a>
<a class="email" href="mailto:[email protected]">Email Us</a>
</footer>
Without nested loaders, you need to specify the full xpath (or css) for each value that you wish to extract.
Example:

loader = ItemLoader(item=Item())
# load stuff not in the footer
loader.add_xpath('social', '//footer/a[@class = "social"]/@href')
loader.add_xpath('email', '//footer/a[@class = "email"]/@href')
loader.load_item()
Instead, you can create a nested loader with the footer selector and add values relative to the footer. The functionality
is the same but you avoid repeating the footer selector.
Example:
loader = ItemLoader(item=Item())
# load stuff not in the footer
footer_loader = loader.nested_xpath('//footer')
footer_loader.add_xpath('social', 'a[@class = "social"]/@href')
footer_loader.add_xpath('email', 'a[@class = "email"]/@href')
# no need to call footer_loader.load_item()
loader.load_item()
You can nest loaders arbitrarily and they work with either xpath or css selectors. As a general guideline, use nested
loaders when they make your code simpler but do not go overboard with nesting or your parser can become difficult
to read.
3.5.8 Reusing and extending Item Loaders
As your project grows bigger and acquires more and more spiders, maintenance becomes a fundamental problem,
especially when you have to deal with many different parsing rules for each spider, having a lot of exceptions, but also
wanting to reuse the common processors.
Item Loaders are designed to ease the maintenance burden of parsing rules, without losing flexibility and, at the same
time, providing a convenient mechanism for extending and overriding them. For this reason Item Loaders support
traditional Python class inheritance for dealing with differences of specific spiders (or groups of spiders).
Suppose, for example, that some particular site encloses their product names in three dashes (e.g. ---Plasma
TV---) and you dont want to end up scraping those dashes in the final product names.
Heres how you can remove those dashes by reusing and extending the default Product Item Loader
(ProductLoader):
from scrapy.loader.processors import MapCompose
from myproject.ItemLoaders import ProductLoader
def strip_dashes(x):
return x.strip('-')
class SiteSpecificLoader(ProductLoader):
name_in = MapCompose(strip_dashes, ProductLoader.name_in)
Another case where extending Item Loaders can be very helpful is when you have multiple source formats, for example
XML and HTML. In the XML version you may want to remove CDATA occurrences. Heres an example of how to do
it:
from scrapy.loader.processors import MapCompose
from myproject.ItemLoaders import ProductLoader
from myproject.utils.xml import remove_cdata
class XmlProductLoader(ProductLoader):
name_in = MapCompose(remove_cdata, ProductLoader.name_in)

And thats how you typically extend input processors.

As for output processors, it is more common to declare them in the field metadata, as they usually depend only on
the field and not on each specific site parsing rule (as input processors do). See also: Declaring Input and Output
Processors.
There are many other possible ways to extend, inherit and override your Item Loaders, and different Item Loaders
hierarchies may fit better for different projects. Scrapy only provides the mechanism; it doesnt impose any specific
organization of your Loaders collection - thats up to you and your projects needs.
3.5.9 Available built-in processors
Even though you can use any callable function as input and output processors, Scrapy provides some commonly
used processors, which are described below. Some of them, like the MapCompose (which is typically used as input
processor) compose the output of several functions executed in order, to produce the final parsed value.
Here is a list of all built-in processors:
class scrapy.loader.processors.Identity
The simplest processor, which doesnt do anything. It returns the original values unchanged. It doesnt receive
any constructor arguments, nor does it accept Loader contexts.
Example:
>>> from scrapy.loader.processors import Identity
>>> proc = Identity()
>>> proc(['one', 'two', 'three'])
['one', 'two', 'three']
class scrapy.loader.processors.TakeFirst
Returns the first non-null/non-empty value from the values received, so its typically used as an output processor
to single-valued fields. It doesnt receive any constructor arguments, nor does it accept Loader contexts.
Example:
>>> from scrapy.loader.processors import TakeFirst
>>> proc = TakeFirst()
>>> proc(['', 'one', 'two', 'three'])
'one'
class scrapy.loader.processors.Join(separator=u )
Returns the values joined with the separator given in the constructor, which defaults to u . It doesnt accept
Loader contexts.
When using the default separator, this processor is equivalent to the function: u .join
Examples:
>>> from scrapy.loader.processors import Join
>>> proc = Join()
u'one two three'
>>> proc = Join('<br>')
u'one<br>two<br>three'
class scrapy.loader.processors.Compose(*functions, **default_loader_context)

A processor which is constructed from the composition of the given functions. This means that each input value
of this processor is passed to the first function, and the result of that function is passed to the second function,
and so on, until the last function returns the output value of this processor.

By default, stop process on None value. This behaviour can be changed by passing keyword argument
stop_on_none=False.
Example:
>>> from scrapy.loader.processors import Compose
>>> proc = Compose(lambda v: v[0], str.upper)
>>> proc(['hello', 'world'])
'HELLO'
Each function can optionally receive a loader_context parameter. For those which do, this processor will
pass the currently active Loader context through that parameter.
The keyword arguments passed in the constructor are used as the default Loader context values passed to each
function call. However, the final Loader context values passed to functions are overridden with the currently
active Loader context accessible through the ItemLoader.context() attribute.
class scrapy.loader.processors.MapCompose(*functions, **default_loader_context)
A processor which is constructed from the composition of the given functions, similar to the Compose pro-
cessor. The difference with this processor is the way internal results are passed among functions, which is as
follows:
The input value of this processor is iterated and the first function is applied to each element. The results of these
function calls (one for each element) are concatenated to construct a new iterable, which is then used to apply
the second function, and so on, until the last function is applied to each value of the list of values collected so
far. The output values of the last function are concatenated together to produce the output of this processor.
Each particular function can return a value or a list of values, which is flattened with the list of values returned
by the same function applied to the other input values. The functions can also return None in which case the
output of that function is ignored for further processing over the chain.
This processor provides a convenient way to compose functions that only work with single values (instead of
iterables). For this reason the MapCompose processor is typically used as input processor, since data is often
extracted using the extract() method of selectors, which returns a list of unicode strings.
The example below should clarify how it works:
>>> def filter_world(x):
... return None if x == 'world' else x
...
>>> from scrapy.loader.processors import MapCompose
>>> proc = MapCompose(filter_world, unicode.upper)
>>> proc([u'hello', u'world', u'this', u'is', u'scrapy'])
[u'HELLO, u'THIS', u'IS', u'SCRAPY']
As with the Compose processor, functions can receive Loader contexts, and constructor keyword arguments are
used as default context values. See Compose processor for more info.
class scrapy.loader.processors.SelectJmes(json_path)
Queries the value using the json path provided to the constructor and returns the output. Requires jmespath
(https://github.com/jmespath/jmespath.py) to run. This processor takes only one input at a time.
Example:
>>> from scrapy.loader.processors import SelectJmes, Compose, MapCompose
>>> proc = SelectJmes("foo") #for direct use on lists and dictionaries
>>> proc({'foo': 'bar'})
'bar'
>>> proc({'foo': {'bar': 'baz'}})
{'bar': 'baz'}

Working with Json:

>>> import json
>>> proc_single_json_str = Compose(json.loads, SelectJmes("foo"))
>>> proc_single_json_str('{"foo": "bar"}')
u'bar'
>>> proc_json_list = Compose(json.loads, MapCompose(SelectJmes('foo')))
>>> proc_json_list('[{"foo":"bar"}, {"baz":"tar"}]')
[u'bar']
3.6 Scrapy shell
The Scrapy shell is an interactive shell where you can try and debug your scraping code very quickly, without having
to run the spider. Its meant to be used for testing data extraction code, but you can actually use it for testing any kind
of code as it is also a regular Python shell.
The shell is used for testing XPath or CSS expressions and see how they work and what data they extract from the web
pages youre trying to scrape. It allows you to interactively test your expressions while youre writing your spider,
without having to run the spider to test every change.
Once you get familiarized with the Scrapy shell, youll see that its an invaluable tool for developing and debugging
your spiders.
3.6.1 Configuring the shell
If you have IPython installed, the Scrapy shell will use it (instead of the standard Python console). The IPython console
is much more powerful and provides smart auto-completion and colorized output, among other things.
We highly recommend you install IPython, specially if youre working on Unix systems (where IPython excels). See
the IPython installation guide for more info.
Scrapy also has support for bpython, and will try to use it where IPython is unavailable.
Through scrapys settings you can configure it to use any one of ipython, bpython or the standard python shell,
regardless of which are installed. This is done by setting the SCRAPY_PYTHON_SHELL environment variable; or by
defining it in your scrapy.cfg:
[settings]
shell = bpython
3.6.2 Launch the shell
To launch the Scrapy shell you can use the shell command like this:
scrapy shell <url>
Where the <url> is the URL you want to scrape.

shell also works for local files. This can be handy if you want to play around with a local copy of a web page.
shell understands the following syntaxes for local files:
# UNIX-style
scrapy shell ./path/to/file.html
scrapy shell ../other/path/to/file.html
scrapy shell /absolute/path/to/file.html
3.6. Scrapy shell 65

# File URI
scrapy shell file:///absolute/path/to/file.html
Note: When using relative file paths, be explicit and prepend them with ./ (or ../ when relevant). scrapy
shell index.html will not work as one might expect (and this is by design, not a bug).
Because shell favors HTTP URLs over File URIs, and index.html being syntactically similar to
example.com, shell will treat index.html as a domain name and trigger a DNS lookup error:
$ scrapy shell index.html
[ ... scrapy shell starts ... ]
[ ... traceback ... ]
twisted.internet.error.DNSLookupError: DNS lookup failed:
address 'index.html' not found: [Errno -5] No address associated with hostname.
shell will not test beforehand if a file called index.html exists in the current directory. Again, be explicit.
3.6.3 Using the shell
The Scrapy shell is just a regular Python console (or IPython console if you have it available) which provides some
additional shortcut functions for convenience.
Available Shortcuts
shelp() - print a help with the list of available objects and shortcuts
fetch(url[, redirect=True]) - fetch a new response from the given URL and update all related
objects accordingly. You can optionaly ask for HTTP 3xx redirections to not be followed by passing
redirect=False
fetch(request) - fetch a new response from the given request and update all related objects accordingly.
view(response) - open the given response in your local web browser, for inspection. This will add a <base>
tag to the response body in order for external links (such as images and style sheets) to display properly. Note,
however, that this will create a temporary file in your computer, which wont be removed automatically.
Available Scrapy objects
The Scrapy shell automatically creates some convenient objects from the downloaded page, like the Response object
and the Selector objects (for both HTML and XML content).
Those objects are:
crawler - the current Crawler object.
spider - the Spider which is known to handle the URL, or a Spider object if there is no spider found for the
current URL
request - a Request object of the last fetched page. You can modify this request using replace() or
fetch a new request (without leaving the shell) using the fetch shortcut.
response - a Response object containing the last fetched page
settings - the current Scrapy settings

3.6.4 Example of shell session
Heres an example of a typical shell session where we start by scraping the http://scrapy.org page, and then proceed to
scrape the https://reddit.com page. Finally, we modify the (Reddit) request method to POST and re-fetch it getting an
error. We end the session by typing Ctrl-D (in Unix systems) or Ctrl-Z in Windows.
Keep in mind that the data extracted here may not be the same when you try it, as those pages are not static and could
have changed by the time you test this. The only purpose of this example is to get you familiarized with how the
Scrapy shell works.
First, we launch the shell:
scrapy shell 'http://scrapy.org' --nolog
Then, the shell fetches the URL (using the Scrapy downloader) and prints the list of available objects and useful
shortcuts (youll notice that these lines all start with the [s] prefix):
[s] scrapy scrapy module (contains scrapy.Request, scrapy.Selector, etc)
[s] crawler <scrapy.crawler.Crawler object at 0x7f07395dd690>
[s] item {}
[s] request <GET http://scrapy.org>
[s] response <200 https://scrapy.org/>
[s] settings <scrapy.settings.Settings object at 0x7f07395dd710>
[s] spider <DefaultSpider 'default' at 0x7f0735891690>
[s] Useful shortcuts:
[s] fetch(url[, redirect=True]) Fetch URL and update local objects (by default, redirects are follo
[s] fetch(req) Fetch a scrapy.Request and update local objects
[s] shelp() Shell help (print this help)
[s] view(response) View response in a browser
>>>
After that, we can start playing with the objects:

>>> response.xpath('//title/text()').extract_first()
'Scrapy | A Fast and Powerful Scraping and Web Crawling Framework'
>>> fetch("http://reddit.com")
>>> response.xpath('//title/text()').extract()
['reddit: the front page of the internet']
>>> request = request.replace(method="POST")
>>> fetch(request)
>>> response.status
404
>>> from pprint import pprint
>>> pprint(response.headers)
{'Accept-Ranges': ['bytes'],
'Cache-Control': ['max-age=0, must-revalidate'],
'Content-Type': ['text/html; charset=UTF-8'],
'Date': ['Thu, 08 Dec 2016 16:21:19 GMT'],
'Server': ['snooserv'],
'Set-Cookie': ['loid=KqNLou0V9SKMX4qb4n; Domain=reddit.com; Max-Age=63071999; Path=/; expires=Sat, 0
'loidcreated=2016-12-08T16%3A21%3A19.445Z; Domain=reddit.com; Max-Age=63071999; Path=
3.6. Scrapy shell 67

'loid=vi0ZVe4NkxNWdlH7r7; Domain=reddit.com; Max-Age=63071999; Path=/; expires=Sat, 0

'loidcreated=2016-12-08T16%3A21%3A19.459Z; Domain=reddit.com; Max-Age=63071999; Path=
'Vary': ['accept-encoding'],
'Via': ['1.1 varnish'],
'X-Cache': ['MISS'],
'X-Cache-Hits': ['0'],
'X-Content-Type-Options': ['nosniff'],
'X-Frame-Options': ['SAMEORIGIN'],
'X-Moose': ['majestic'],
'X-Served-By': ['cache-cdg8730-CDG'],
'X-Timer': ['S1481214079.394283,VS0,VE159'],
'X-Ua-Compatible': ['IE=edge'],
'X-Xss-Protection': ['1; mode=block']}
>>>
3.6.5 Invoking the shell from spiders to inspect responses
Sometimes you want to inspect the responses that are being processed in a certain point of your spider, if only to check
that response you expect is getting there.
This can be achieved by using the scrapy.shell.inspect_response function.
Heres an example of how you would call it from your spider:
import scrapy
name = "myspider"
start_urls = [
"http://example.com",
"http://example.org",
"http://example.net",
]

# We want to inspect one specific response.
if ".org" in response.url:
from scrapy.shell import inspect_response
inspect_response(response, self)
# Rest of parsing code.
When you run the spider, you will get something similar to this:
2014-01-23 17:48:31-0400 [scrapy.core.engine] DEBUG: Crawled (200) <GET http://example.com> (referer:
2014-01-23 17:48:31-0400 [scrapy.core.engine] DEBUG: Crawled (200) <GET http://example.org> (referer:
[s] crawler <scrapy.crawler.Crawler object at 0x1e16b50>
...
>>> response.url
'http://example.org'
Then, you can check if the extraction code is working:

>>> response.xpath('//h1[@class="fn"]')
[]

Nope, it doesnt. So you can open the response in your web browser and see if its the response you were expecting:
>>> view(response)
True
Finally you hit Ctrl-D (or Ctrl-Z in Windows) to exit the shell and resume the crawling:
>>> ^D
2014-01-23 17:50:03-0400 [scrapy.core.engine] DEBUG: Crawled (200) <GET http://example.net> (referer:
...
Note that you cant use the fetch shortcut here since the Scrapy engine is blocked by the shell. However, after you
leave the shell, the spider will continue crawling where it stopped, as shown above.
3.7 Item Pipeline
After an item has been scraped by a spider, it is sent to the Item Pipeline which processes it through several components
that are executed sequentially.
Each item pipeline component (sometimes referred as just Item Pipeline) is a Python class that implements a simple
method. They receive an item and perform an action over it, also deciding if the item should continue through the
pipeline or be dropped and no longer processed.
Typical uses of item pipelines are:
cleansing HTML data
validating scraped data (checking that the items contain certain fields)
checking for duplicates (and dropping them)
storing the scraped item in a database
3.7.1 Writing your own item pipeline
Each item pipeline component is a Python class that must implement the following method:
process_item(self, item, spider)
This method is called for every item pipeline component. process_item() must either: return a dict with
data, return an Item (or any descendant class) object, return a Twisted Deferred or raise DropItem exception.
Dropped items are no longer processed by further pipeline components.
Parameters
item (Item object or a dict) the item scraped
spider (Spider object) the spider which scraped the item
Additionally, they may also implement the following methods:
open_spider(self, spider)
This method is called when the spider is opened.
Parameters spider (Spider object) the spider which was opened
close_spider(self, spider)
This method is called when the spider is closed.
Parameters spider (Spider object) the spider which was closed
3.7. Item Pipeline 69

from_crawler(cls, crawler)
If present, this classmethod is called to create a pipeline instance from a Crawler. It must return a new instance
of the pipeline. Crawler object provides access to all Scrapy core components like settings and signals; it is a
way for pipeline to access them and hook its functionality into Scrapy.
Parameters crawler (Crawler object) crawler that uses this pipeline
3.7.2 Item pipeline example
Price validation and dropping items with no prices
Lets take a look at the following hypothetical pipeline that adjusts the price attribute for those items that do not
include VAT (price_excludes_vat attribute), and drops those items which dont contain a price:
from scrapy.exceptions import DropItem
class PricePipeline(object):
vat_factor = 1.15
def process_item(self, item, spider):

if item['price']:
if item['price_excludes_vat']:
item['price'] = item['price'] * self.vat_factor
return item
else:
raise DropItem("Missing price in %s" % item)
Write items to a JSON file
The following pipeline stores all scraped items (from all spiders) into a single items.jl file, containing one item
per line serialized in JSON format:
import json
class JsonWriterPipeline(object):
def open_spider(self, spider):

self.file = open('items.jl', 'wb')
def close_spider(self, spider):

self.file.close()

line = json.dumps(dict(item)) + "\n"
self.file.write(line)
return item
Note: The purpose of JsonWriterPipeline is just to introduce how to write item pipelines. If you really want to store
all scraped items into a JSON file you should use the Feed exports.

Write items to MongoDB
In this example well write items to MongoDB using pymongo. MongoDB address and database name are specified
in Scrapy settings; MongoDB collection is named after item class.
The main point of this example is to show how to use from_crawler() method and how to clean up the resources
properly.:
import pymongo
class MongoPipeline(object):
collection_name = 'scrapy_items'
def __init__(self, mongo_uri, mongo_db):

self.mongo_uri = mongo_uri
self.mongo_db = mongo_db
@classmethod
def from_crawler(cls, crawler):
return cls(
mongo_uri=crawler.settings.get('MONGO_URI'),
mongo_db=crawler.settings.get('MONGO_DATABASE', 'items')
)
def open_spider(self, spider):

self.client = pymongo.MongoClient(self.mongo_uri)
self.db = self.client[self.mongo_db]
def close_spider(self, spider):

self.client.close()

self.db[self.collection_name].insert(dict(item))
return item
Take screenshot of item
This example demonstrates how to return Deferred from process_item() method. It uses Splash to render screen-
shot of item url. Pipeline makes request to locally running instance of Splash. After request is downloaded and
Deferred callback fires, it saves item to a file and adds filename to an item.
import scrapy
import hashlib
from urllib.parse import quote
class ScreenshotPipeline(object):
"""Pipeline that uses Splash to render screenshot of
every Scrapy item."""
SPLASH_URL = "http://localhost:8050/render.png?url={}"

encoded_item_url = quote(item["url"])
screenshot_url = self.SPLASH_URL.format(encoded_item_url)
request = scrapy.Request(screenshot_url)
dfd = spider.crawler.engine.download(request, spider)
3.7. Item Pipeline 71

dfd.addBoth(self.return_item, item)
return dfd
def return_item(self, response, item):

if response.status != 200:
# Error happened, return item.
return item
# Save screenshot to file, filename will be hash of url.

url = item["url"]
url_hash = hashlib.md5(url.encode("utf8")).hexdigest()
filename = "{}.png".format(url_hash)
with open(filename, "wb") as f:
# Store filename in item.

item["screenshot_filename"] = filename
return item
Duplicates filter
A filter that looks for duplicate items, and drops those items that were already processed. Lets say that our items have
a unique id, but our spider returns multiples items with the same id:
class DuplicatesPipeline(object):
def __init__(self):
self.ids_seen = set()

if item['id'] in self.ids_seen:
raise DropItem("Duplicate item found: %s" % item)
else:
self.ids_seen.add(item['id'])
return item
3.7.3 Activating an Item Pipeline component
To activate an Item Pipeline component you must add its class to the ITEM_PIPELINES setting, like in the following
example:
ITEM_PIPELINES = {
'myproject.pipelines.PricePipeline': 300,
'myproject.pipelines.JsonWriterPipeline': 800,
}
The integer values you assign to classes in this setting determine the order in which they run: items go through from
lower valued to higher valued classes. Its customary to define these numbers in the 0-1000 range.
3.8 Feed exports

One of the most frequently required features when implementing scrapers is being able to store the scraped data
properly and, quite often, that means generating an export file with the scraped data (commonly called export
feed) to be consumed by other systems.
Scrapy provides this functionality out of the box with the Feed Exports, which allows you to generate a feed with the
scraped items, using multiple serialization formats and storage backends.
3.8.1 Serialization formats
For serializing the scraped data, the feed exports use the Item exporters. These formats are supported out of the box:
JSON
JSON lines
CSV
XML
But you can also extend the supported format through the FEED_EXPORTERS setting.
JSON
FEED_FORMAT: json
Exporter used: JsonItemExporter
See this warning if youre using JSON with large feeds.
JSON lines
FEED_FORMAT: jsonlines
Exporter used: JsonLinesItemExporter
CSV
FEED_FORMAT: csv
Exporter used: CsvItemExporter
To specify columns to export and their order use FEED_EXPORT_FIELDS. Other feed exporters can also use
this option, but it is important for CSV because unlike many other export formats CSV uses a fixed header.
XML
FEED_FORMAT: xml
Exporter used: XmlItemExporter
Pickle
FEED_FORMAT: pickle
Exporter used: PickleItemExporter
3.8. Feed exports 73

Marshal
FEED_FORMAT: marshal
Exporter used: MarshalItemExporter
3.8.2 Storages
When using the feed exports you define where to store the feed using a URI (through the FEED_URI setting). The
feed exports supports multiple storage backend types which are defined by the URI scheme.
The storages backends supported out of the box are:
Local filesystem
FTP
S3 (requires botocore or boto)
Standard output
Some storage backends may be unavailable if the required external libraries are not available. For example, the S3
backend is only available if the botocore or boto library is installed (Scrapy supports boto only on Python 2).
3.8.3 Storage URI parameters
The storage URI can also contain parameters that get replaced when the feed is being created. These parameters are:
%(time)s - gets replaced by a timestamp when the feed is being created
%(name)s - gets replaced by the spider name
Any other named parameter gets replaced by the spider attribute of the same name. For example, %(site_id)s
would get replaced by the spider.site_id attribute the moment the feed is being created.
Here are some examples to illustrate:
Store in FTP using one directory per spider:
ftp://user:[email protected]/scraping/feeds/%(name)s/%(time)s.json
Store in S3 using one directory per spider:
s3://mybucket/scraping/feeds/%(name)s/%(time)s.json
3.8.4 Storage backends
Local filesystem
The feeds are stored in the local filesystem.

URI scheme: file
Example URI: file:///tmp/export.csv
Required external libraries: none
Note that for the local filesystem storage (only) you can omit the scheme if you specify an absolute path like
/tmp/export.csv. This only works on Unix systems though.

FTP
The feeds are stored in a FTP server.

URI scheme: ftp
Example URI: ftp://user:[email protected]/path/to/export.csv
S3
The feeds are stored on Amazon S3.

URI scheme: s3
Example URIs:
s3://mybucket/path/to/export.csv
s3://aws_key:aws_secret@mybucket/path/to/export.csv
Required external libraries: botocore or boto
The AWS credentials can be passed as user/password in the URI, or they can be passed through the following settings:
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
Standard output
The feeds are written to the standard output of the Scrapy process.
URI scheme: stdout
Example URI: stdout:
3.8.5 Settings
These are the settings used for configuring the feed exports:
FEED_URI (mandatory)
FEED_FORMAT
FEED_STORAGES
FEED_EXPORTERS
FEED_STORE_EMPTY
FEED_EXPORT_ENCODING
FEED_EXPORT_FIELDS
3.8. Feed exports 75

FEED_URI
Default: None
The URI of the export feed. See Storage backends for supported URI schemes.
This setting is required for enabling the feed exports.
FEED_FORMAT
The serialization format to be used for the feed. See Serialization formats for possible values.
Default: None
The encoding to be used for the feed.
If unset or set to None (default) it uses UTF-8 for everything except JSON output, which uses safe numeric encoding
(\uXXXX sequences) for historic reasons.
Use utf-8 if you want UTF-8 for JSON too.
FEED_EXPORT_FIELDS
Default: None
A list of fields to export, optional. Example: FEED_EXPORT_FIELDS = ["foo", "bar", "baz"].
Use FEED_EXPORT_FIELDS option to define fields to export and their order.
When FEED_EXPORT_FIELDS is empty or None (default), Scrapy uses fields defined in dicts or Item subclasses a
spider is yielding.
If an exporter requires a fixed set of fields (this is the case for CSV export format) and FEED_EXPORT_FIELDS is
empty or None, then Scrapy tries to infer field names from the exported data - currently it uses field names from the
first item.
FEED_STORE_EMPTY
Default: False
Whether to export empty feeds (ie. feeds with no items).
FEED_STORAGES
Default: {}
A dict containing additional feed storage backends supported by your project. The keys are URI schemes and the
values are paths to storage classes.

FEED_STORAGES_BASE
Default:
{
'': 'scrapy.extensions.feedexport.FileFeedStorage',
'file': 'scrapy.extensions.feedexport.FileFeedStorage',
'stdout': 'scrapy.extensions.feedexport.StdoutFeedStorage',
's3': 'scrapy.extensions.feedexport.S3FeedStorage',
'ftp': 'scrapy.extensions.feedexport.FTPFeedStorage',
}
A dict containing the built-in feed storage backends supported by Scrapy. You can disable any of these backends by
assigning None to their URI scheme in FEED_STORAGES. E.g., to disable the built-in FTP storage backend (without
replacement), place this in your settings.py:
FEED_STORAGES = {
'ftp': None,
}
FEED_EXPORTERS
Default: {}
A dict containing additional exporters supported by your project. The keys are serialization formats and the values are
paths to Item exporter classes.
FEED_EXPORTERS_BASE
Default:
{
'json': 'scrapy.exporters.JsonItemExporter',
'jsonlines': 'scrapy.exporters.JsonLinesItemExporter',
'jl': 'scrapy.exporters.JsonLinesItemExporter',
'csv': 'scrapy.exporters.CsvItemExporter',
'xml': 'scrapy.exporters.XmlItemExporter',
'marshal': 'scrapy.exporters.MarshalItemExporter',
'pickle': 'scrapy.exporters.PickleItemExporter',
}
A dict containing the built-in feed exporters supported by Scrapy. You can disable any of these exporters by assign-
ing None to their serialization format in FEED_EXPORTERS. E.g., to disable the built-in CSV exporter (without
replacement), place this in your settings.py:
FEED_EXPORTERS = {
'csv': None,
}
3.9 Requests and Responses
Scrapy uses Request and Response objects for crawling web sites.
Typically, Request objects are generated in the spiders and pass across the system until they reach the Downloader,
which executes the request and returns a Response object which travels back to the spider that issued the request.
3.9. Requests and Responses 77

Both Request and Response classes have subclasses which add functionality not required in the base classes.
These are described below in Request subclasses and Response subclasses.
3.9.1 Request objects
class scrapy.http.Request(url[, callback, method=GET, headers, body, cookies, meta,

encoding=utf-8, priority=0, dont_filter=False, errback ])
A Request object represents an HTTP request, which is usually generated in the Spider and executed by the
Downloader, and thus generating a Response.
Parameters
url (string) the URL of this request
callback (callable) the function that will be called with the response of this re-
quest (once its downloaded) as its first parameter. For more information see Passing addi-
tional data to callback functions below. If a Request doesnt specify a callback, the spiders
parse() method will be used. Note that if exceptions are raised during processing, errback
is called instead.
method (string) the HTTP method of this request. Defaults to GET.
meta (dict) the initial values for the Request.meta attribute. If given, the dict passed
in this parameter will be shallow copied.
body (str or unicode) the request body. If a unicode is passed, then its encoded
to str using the encoding passed (which defaults to utf-8). If body is not given, an
empty string is stored. Regardless of the type of this argument, the final value stored will be
a str (never unicode or None).
headers (dict) the headers of this request. The dict values can be strings (for single
valued headers) or lists (for multi-valued headers). If None is passed as value, the HTTP
header will not be sent at all.
cookies (dict or list) the request cookies. These can be sent in two forms.
1. Using a dict:
request_with_cookies = Request(url="http://www.example.com",
cookies={'currency': 'USD', 'country': 'UY'})
2. Using a list of dicts:
cookies=[{'name': 'currency',
'value': 'USD',
'domain': 'example.com',
'path': '/currency'}])
The latter form allows for customizing the domain and path attributes of the cookie. This
is only useful if the cookies are saved for later requests.
When some site returns cookies (in a response) those are stored in the cookies for that
domain and will be sent again in future requests. Thats the typical behaviour of any regular
web browser. However, if, for some reason, you want to avoid merging with existing cookies
you can instruct Scrapy to do so by setting the dont_merge_cookies key to True in the
Request.meta.
Example of request without merging cookies:

cookies={'currency': 'USD', 'country': 'UY'},
meta={'dont_merge_cookies': True})
For more info see CookiesMiddleware.

encoding (string) the encoding of this request (defaults to utf-8). This encod-
ing will be used to percent-encode the URL and to convert the body to str (if given as
unicode).
priority (int) the priority of this request (defaults to 0). The priority is used by the
scheduler to define the order used to process requests. Requests with a higher priority value
will execute earlier. Negative values are allowed in order to indicate relatively low-priority.
dont_filter (boolean) indicates that this request should not be filtered by the sched-
uler. This is used when you want to perform an identical request multiple times, to ignore
the duplicates filter. Use it with care, or you will get into crawling loops. Default to False.
errback (callable) a function that will be called if any exception was raised while
processing the request. This includes pages that failed with 404 HTTP errors and such.
It receives a Twisted Failure instance as first parameter. For more information, see Using
errbacks to catch exceptions in request processing below.
url
A string containing the URL of this request. Keep in mind that this attribute contains the escaped URL, so
it can differ from the URL passed in the constructor.
This attribute is read-only. To change the URL of a Request use replace().
method
A string representing the HTTP method in the request. This is guaranteed to be uppercase. Example:
"GET", "POST", "PUT", etc
headers
A dictionary-like object which contains the request headers.
body
A str that contains the request body.
This attribute is read-only. To change the body of a Request use replace().
meta
A dict that contains arbitrary metadata for this request. This dict is empty for new Requests, and is usually
populated by different Scrapy components (extensions, middlewares, etc). So the data contained in this
dict depends on the extensions you have enabled.
See Request.meta special keys for a list of special meta keys recognized by Scrapy.
This dict is shallow copied when the request is cloned using the copy() or replace() methods, and
can also be accessed, in your spider, from the response.meta attribute.
copy()
Return a new Request which is a copy of this Request. See also: Passing additional data to callback
functions.
replace([url, method, headers, body, cookies, meta, encoding, dont_filter, callback, errback ])
Return a Request object with the same members, except for those members given new values by whichever
keyword arguments are specified. The attribute Request.meta is copied by default (unless a new value
is given in the meta argument). See also Passing additional data to callback functions.

Passing additional data to callback functions
The callback of a request is a function that will be called when the response of that request is downloaded. The
callback function will be called with the downloaded Response object as its first argument.
Example:
def parse_page1(self, response):
return scrapy.Request("http://www.example.com/some_page.html",
callback=self.parse_page2)

# this would log http://www.example.com/some_page.html
self.logger.info("Visited %s", response.url)
In some cases you may be interested in passing arguments to those callback functions so you can receive the arguments
later, in the second callback. You can use the Request.meta attribute for that.
Heres an example of how to pass an item using this mechanism, to populate different fields from different pages:
item = MyItem()
item['main_url'] = response.url
request = scrapy.Request("http://www.example.com/some_page.html",
callback=self.parse_page2)
request.meta['item'] = item
yield request

item = response.meta['item']
item['other_url'] = response.url
yield item
Using errbacks to catch exceptions in request processing
The errback of a request is a function that will be called when an exception is raise while processing it.
It receives a Twisted Failure instance as first parameter and can be used to track connection establishment timeouts,
DNS errors etc.
Heres an example spider logging all errors and catching some specific errors if needed:
import scrapy
from scrapy.spidermiddlewares.httperror import HttpError

from twisted.internet.error import DNSLookupError
from twisted.internet.error import TimeoutError, TCPTimedOutError
class ErrbackSpider(scrapy.Spider):
name = "errback_example"
start_urls = [
"http://www.httpbin.org/", # HTTP 200 expected
"http://www.httpbin.org/status/404", # Not found error
"http://www.httpbin.org/status/500", # server issue
"http://www.httpbin.org:12345/", # non-responding host, timeout expected
"http://www.httphttpbinbin.org/", # DNS error expected
]

for u in self.start_urls:
yield scrapy.Request(u, callback=self.parse_httpbin,
errback=self.errback_httpbin,
dont_filter=True)
def parse_httpbin(self, response):

self.logger.info('Got successful response from {}'.format(response.url))
# do something useful here...
def errback_httpbin(self, failure):

# log all failures
self.logger.error(repr(failure))
# in case you want to do something special for some errors,

# you may need the failure's type:
if failure.check(HttpError):
# these exceptions come from HttpError spider middleware
# you can get the non-200 response
response = failure.value.response
self.logger.error('HttpError on %s', response.url)
elif failure.check(DNSLookupError):
# this is the original request
request = failure.request
self.logger.error('DNSLookupError on %s', request.url)
elif failure.check(TimeoutError, TCPTimedOutError):

request = failure.request
self.logger.error('TimeoutError on %s', request.url)
3.9.2 Request.meta special keys
The Request.meta attribute can contain any arbitrary data, but there are some special keys recognized by Scrapy
and its built-in extensions.
Those are:
dont_redirect
dont_retry
handle_httpstatus_list
handle_httpstatus_all
dont_merge_cookies (see cookies parameter of Request constructor)
cookiejar
dont_cache
redirect_urls
bindaddress
dont_obey_robotstxt
download_timeout
download_maxsize

download_latency
proxy
bindaddress
The IP of the outgoing IP address to use for the performing the request.
download_timeout
The amount of time (in secs) that the downloader will wait before timing out. See also: DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT.
download_latency
The amount of time spent to fetch the response, since the request has been started, i.e. HTTP message sent over the
network. This meta key only becomes available when the response has been downloaded. While most other meta keys
are used to control Scrapy behavior, this one is supposed to be read-only.
3.9.3 Request subclasses
Here is the list of built-in Request subclasses. You can also subclass it to implement your own custom functionality.
FormRequest objects
The FormRequest class extends the base Request with functionality for dealing with HTML forms. It uses lxml.html
forms to pre-populate form fields with form data from Response objects.
class scrapy.http.FormRequest(url[, formdata, ... ])
The FormRequest class adds a new argument to the constructor. The remaining arguments are the same as
for the Request class and are not documented here.
Parameters formdata (dict or iterable of tuples) is a dictionary (or iterable of
(key, value) tuples) containing HTML Form data which will be url-encoded and assigned to the
body of the request.
The FormRequest objects support the following class method in addition to the standard Request methods:
classmethod from_response(response[, formname=None, formid=None, formnumber=0, for-

mdata=None, formxpath=None, formcss=None, clickdata=None,
dont_click=False, ... ])
Returns a new FormRequest object with its form field values pre-populated with those found in
the HTML <form> element contained in the given response. For an example see Using FormRe-
quest.from_response() to simulate a user login.
The policy is to automatically simulate a click, by default, on any form control that looks clickable, like
a <input type="submit">. Even though this is quite convenient, and often the desired behaviour,
sometimes it can cause problems which could be hard to debug. For example, when working with forms
that are filled and/or submitted using javascript, the default from_response() behaviour may not be
the most appropriate. To disable this behaviour you can set the dont_click argument to True. Also, if
you want to change the control clicked (instead of disabling it) you can also use the clickdata argument.
Parameters

response (Response object) the response containing a HTML form which will be
used to pre-populate the form fields
formname (string) if given, the form with name attribute set to this value will be
used.
formid (string) if given, the form with id attribute set to this value will be used.
formxpath (string) if given, the first form that matches the xpath will be used.
formcss (string) if given, the first form that matches the css selector will be used.
formnumber (integer) the number of form to use, when the response contains
multiple forms. The first one (and also the default) is 0.
formdata (dict) fields to override in the form data. If a field was already present in
the response <form> element, its value is overridden by the one passed in this parameter.
clickdata (dict) attributes to lookup the control clicked. If its not given, the form
data will be submitted simulating a click on the first clickable element. In addition to html
attributes, the control can be identified by its zero-based index relative to other submittable
inputs inside the form, via the nr attribute.
dont_click (boolean) If True, the form data will be submitted without clicking in
any element.
The other parameters of this class method are passed directly to the FormRequest constructor.
New in version 0.10.3: The formname parameter.
New in version 0.17: The formxpath parameter.
New in version 1.1.0: The formcss parameter.
New in version 1.1.0: The formid parameter.
Request usage examples
Using FormRequest to send data via HTTP POST
If you want to simulate a HTML Form POST in your spider and send a couple of key-value fields, you can return a
FormRequest object (from your spider) like this:
return [FormRequest(url="http://www.example.com/post/action",
formdata={'name': 'John Doe', 'age': '27'},
callback=self.after_post)]
Using FormRequest.from_response() to simulate a user login
It is usual for web sites to provide pre-populated form fields through <input type="hidden"> elements, such
as session related data or authentication tokens (for login pages). When scraping, youll want these fields to be
automatically pre-populated and only override a couple of them, such as the user name and password. You can use the
FormRequest.from_response() method for this job. Heres an example spider which uses it:
import scrapy
class LoginSpider(scrapy.Spider):
start_urls = ['http://www.example.com/users/login.php']


return scrapy.FormRequest.from_response(
response,
formdata={'username': 'john', 'password': 'secret'},
callback=self.after_login
)
def after_login(self, response):

# check login succeed before going on
if "authentication failed" in response.body:
self.logger.error("Login failed")
return
# continue scraping with authenticated session...
3.9.4 Response objects
class scrapy.http.Response(url[, status=200, headers=None, body=b, flags=None, request=None

])
A Response object represents an HTTP response, which is usually downloaded (by the Downloader) and fed
to the Spiders for processing.
Parameters
url (string) the URL of this response
status (integer) the HTTP status of the response. Defaults to 200.
headers (dict) the headers of this response. The dict values can be strings (for single
valued headers) or lists (for multi-valued headers).
body (str) the response body. It must be str, not unicode, unless youre using a
encoding-aware Response subclass, such as TextResponse.
flags (list) is a list containing the initial values for the Response.flags attribute.
If given, the list will be shallow copied.
request (Request object) the initial value of the Response.request attribute.
This represents the Request that generated this response.
url
A string containing the URL of the response.
This attribute is read-only. To change the URL of a Response use replace().
status
An integer representing the HTTP status of the response. Example: 200, 404.
headers
A dictionary-like object which contains the response headers. Values can be accessed using get() to
return the first header value with the specified name or getlist() to return all header values with the
specified name. For example, this call will give you all cookies in the headers:
response.headers.getlist('Set-Cookie')
body
The body of this Response. Keep in mind that Response.body is always a bytes object. If you want the
unicode version use TextResponse.text (only available in TextResponse and subclasses).
This attribute is read-only. To change the body of a Response use replace().

request
The Request object that generated this response. This attribute is assigned in the Scrapy engine, after
the response and the request have passed through all Downloader Middlewares. In particular, this means
that:
HTTP redirections will cause the original request (to the URL before redirection) to be assigned to
the redirected response (with the final URL after redirection).
Response.request.url doesnt always equal Response.url
This attribute is only available in the spider code, and in the Spider Middlewares, but not in Down-
loader Middlewares (although you have the Request available there by other means) and handlers of
the response_downloaded signal.
meta
A shortcut to the Request.meta attribute of the Response.request object (ie.
self.request.meta).
Unlike the Response.request attribute, the Response.meta attribute is propagated along redirects
and retries, so you will get the original Request.meta sent from your spider.
See also:
Request.meta attribute
flags
A list that contains flags for this response. Flags are labels used for tagging Responses. For example:
cached, redirected, etc. And theyre shown on the string representation of the Response (__str__
method) which is used by the engine for logging.
copy()
Returns a new Response which is a copy of this Response.
replace([url, status, headers, body, request, flags, cls ])
Returns a Response object with the same members, except for those members given new values by
whichever keyword arguments are specified. The attribute Response.meta is copied by default.
urljoin(url)
Constructs an absolute url by combining the Responses url with a possible relative url.
This is a wrapper over urlparse.urljoin, its merely an alias for making this call:
urlparse.urljoin(response.url, url)
3.9.5 Response subclasses
Here is the list of available built-in Response subclasses. You can also subclass the Response class to implement your
own functionality.
TextResponse objects
class scrapy.http.TextResponse(url[, encoding[, ... ]])

TextResponse objects adds encoding capabilities to the base Response class, which is meant to be used
only for binary data, such as images, sounds or any media file.
TextResponse objects support a new constructor argument, in addition to the base Response objects. The
remaining functionality is the same as for the Response class and is not documented here.

Parameters encoding (string) is a string which contains the encoding to use for this re-
sponse. If you create a TextResponse object with a unicode body, it will be encoded using
this encoding (remember the body attribute is always a string). If encoding is None (default
value), the encoding will be looked up in the response headers and body instead.
TextResponse objects support the following attributes in addition to the standard Response ones:
text
Response body, as unicode.
The same as response.body.decode(response.encoding), but the result is cached after the
first call, so you can access response.text multiple times without extra overhead.
Note: unicode(response.body) is not a correct way to convert response body to unicode: you
would be using the system default encoding (typically ascii) instead of the response encoding.
encoding
A string with the encoding of this response. The encoding is resolved by trying the following mechanisms,
in order:
1.the encoding passed in the constructor encoding argument
2.the encoding declared in the Content-Type HTTP header. If this encoding is not valid (ie. unknown),
it is ignored and the next resolution mechanism is tried.
3.the encoding declared in the response body. The TextResponse class doesnt provide any special
functionality for this. However, the HtmlResponse and XmlResponse classes do.
4.the encoding inferred by looking at the response body. This is the more fragile method but also the
last one tried.
selector
A Selector instance using the response as target. The selector is lazily instantiated on first access.
TextResponse objects support the following methods in addition to the standard Response ones:
xpath(query)
A shortcut to TextResponse.selector.xpath(query):
response.xpath('//p')
css(query)
A shortcut to TextResponse.selector.css(query):
response.css('p')
body_as_unicode()
The same as text, but available as a method. This method is kept for backwards compatibility; please
prefer response.text.
HtmlResponse objects
class scrapy.http.HtmlResponse(url[, ... ])

The HtmlResponse class is a subclass of TextResponse which adds encoding auto-discovering support
by looking into the HTML meta http-equiv attribute. See TextResponse.encoding.

XmlResponse objects
class scrapy.http.XmlResponse(url[, ... ])

The XmlResponse class is a subclass of TextResponse which adds encoding auto-discovering support by
looking into the XML declaration line. See TextResponse.encoding.
3.10 Link Extractors
Link extractors are objects whose only purpose is to extract links from web pages (scrapy.http.Response
objects) which will be eventually followed.
There is scrapy.linkextractors import LinkExtractor available in Scrapy, but you can create your
own custom Link Extractors to suit your needs by implementing a simple interface.
The only public method that every link extractor has is extract_links, which receives a Response object
and returns a list of scrapy.link.Link objects. Link extractors are meant to be instantiated once and their
extract_links method called several times with different responses to extract links to follow.
Link extractors are used in the CrawlSpider class (available in Scrapy), through a set of rules, but you can also use
it in your spiders, even if you dont subclass from CrawlSpider, as its purpose is very simple: to extract links.
3.10.1 Built-in link extractors reference
Link extractors classes bundled with Scrapy are provided in the scrapy.linkextractors module.
The default link extractor is LinkExtractor, which is the same as LxmlLinkExtractor:
There used to be other link extractor classes in previous Scrapy versions, but they are deprecated now.
LxmlLinkExtractor
class scrapy.linkextractors.lxmlhtml.LxmlLinkExtractor(allow=(), deny=(),

allow_domains=(),
deny_domains=(),
deny_extensions=None,
restrict_xpaths=(), re-
strict_css=(), tags=(a,
area), attrs=(href, ), canon-
icalize=True, unique=True,
process_value=None)
LxmlLinkExtractor is the recommended link extractor with handy filtering options. It is implemented using
lxmls robust HTMLParser.
Parameters
allow (a regular expression (or list of)) a single regular expression (or
list of regular expressions) that the (absolute) urls must match in order to be extracted. If
not given (or empty), it will match all links.
deny (a regular expression (or list of)) a single regular expression (or
list of regular expressions) that the (absolute) urls must match in order to be excluded (ie.
not extracted). It has precedence over the allow parameter. If not given (or empty) it wont
exclude any links.
3.10. Link Extractors 87

allow_domains (str or list) a single value or a list of string containing domains

which will be considered for extracting the links
deny_domains (str or list) a single value or a list of strings containing domains
which wont be considered for extracting the links
deny_extensions (list) a single value or list of strings containing extensions
that should be ignored when extracting links. If not given, it will default to the
IGNORED_EXTENSIONS list defined in the scrapy.linkextractors package.
restrict_xpaths (str or list) is an XPath (or list of XPaths) which defines
regions inside the response where links should be extracted from. If given, only the text
selected by those XPath will be scanned for links. See examples below.
restrict_css (str or list) a CSS selector (or list of selectors) which defines
regions inside the response where links should be extracted from. Has the same behaviour
as restrict_xpaths.
tags (str or list) a tag or a list of tags to consider when extracting links. Defaults
to (a, area).
attrs (list) an attribute or list of attributes which should be considered when look-
ing for links to extract (only for those tags specified in the tags parameter). Defaults to
(href,)
canonicalize (boolean) canonicalize each extracted url (using
w3lib.url.canonicalize_url). Defaults to True.
unique (boolean) whether duplicate filtering should be applied to extracted links.
process_value (callable) a function which receives each value extracted from the
tag and attributes scanned and can modify the value and return a new one, or return None
to ignore the link altogether. If not given, process_value defaults to lambda x: x.
For example, to extract links from this code:
<a href="javascript:goToPage('../other/page.html'); return false">Link text</a>
You can use the following function in process_value:
def process_value(value):
m = re.search("javascript:goToPage\('(.*?)'", value)
if m:
return m.group(1)
3.11 Settings
The Scrapy settings allows you to customize the behaviour of all Scrapy components, including the core, extensions,
pipelines and spiders themselves.
The infrastructure of the settings provides a global namespace of key-value mappings that the code can use to pull
configuration values from. The settings can be populated through different mechanisms, which are described below.
The settings are also the mechanism for selecting the currently active Scrapy project (in case you have many).
For a list of available built-in settings see: Built-in settings reference.

3.11.1 Designating the settings
When you use Scrapy, you have to tell it which settings youre using. You can do this by using an environment variable,
SCRAPY_SETTINGS_MODULE.
The value of SCRAPY_SETTINGS_MODULE should be in Python path syntax, e.g. myproject.settings. Note
that the settings module should be on the Python import search path.
3.11.2 Populating the settings
Settings can be populated using different mechanisms, each of which having a different precedence. Here is the list of
them in decreasing order of precedence:
1. Command line options (most precedence)
2. Settings per-spider
3. Project settings module
4. Default settings per-command
5. Default global settings (less precedence)
The population of these settings sources is taken care of internally, but a manual handling is possible using API calls.
See the Settings API topic for reference.
These mechanisms are described in more detail below.
1. Command line options
Arguments provided by the command line are the ones that take most precedence, overriding any other options. You
can explicitly override one (or more) settings using the -s (or --set) command line option.
Example:
scrapy crawl myspider -s LOG_FILE=scrapy.log
2. Settings per-spider
Spiders (See the Spiders chapter for reference) can define their own settings that will take precedence and override the
project ones. They can do so by setting their custom_settings attribute:
name = 'myspider'
custom_settings = {
'SOME_SETTING': 'some value',
}
3. Project settings module
The project settings module is the standard configuration file for your Scrapy project, its where most of your custom
settings will be populated. For a standard Scrapy project, this means youll be adding or changing the settings in the
settings.py file created for your project.
3.11. Settings 89
4. Default settings per-command
Each Scrapy tool command can have its own default settings, which override the global default settings. Those custom
command settings are specified in the default_settings attribute of the command class.
5. Default global settings
The global defaults are located in the scrapy.settings.default_settings module and documented in the
Built-in settings reference section.
3.11.3 How to access settings
In a spider, the settings are available through self.settings:

name = 'myspider'
start_urls = ['http://example.com']

print("Existing settings: %s" % self.settings.attributes.keys())
Note: The settings attribute is set in the base Spider class after the spider is initialized. If you want to
use the settings before the initialization (e.g., in your spiders __init__() method), youll need to override the
from_crawler() method.
Settings can be accessed through the scrapy.crawler.Crawler.settings attribute of the Crawler that is
passed to from_crawler method in extensions, middlewares and item pipelines:
class MyExtension(object):
def __init__(self, log_is_enabled=False):
if log_is_enabled:
print("log is enabled!")
@classmethod
settings = crawler.settings
return cls(settings.getbool('LOG_ENABLED'))
The settings object can be used like a dict (e.g., settings[LOG_ENABLED]), but its usually preferred to extract
the setting in the format you need it to avoid type errors, using one of the methods provided by the Settings API.
3.11.4 Rationale for setting names
Setting names are usually prefixed with the component that they configure. For example, proper setting names for
a fictional robots.txt extension would be ROBOTSTXT_ENABLED, ROBOTSTXT_OBEY, ROBOTSTXT_CACHEDIR,
etc.
3.11.5 Built-in settings reference
Heres a list of all available Scrapy settings, in alphabetical order, along with their default values and the scope where
they apply.

The scope, where available, shows where the setting is being used, if its tied to any particular component. In that case
the module of that component will be shown, typically an extension, middleware or pipeline. It also means that the
component must be enabled in order for the setting to have any effect.
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
Default: None
The AWS access key used by code that requires access to Amazon Web services, such as the S3 feed storage backend.
Default: None
The AWS secret key used by code that requires access to Amazon Web services, such as the S3 feed storage backend.
BOT_NAME
Default: scrapybot
The name of the bot implemented by this Scrapy project (also known as the project name). This will be used to
construct the User-Agent by default, and also for logging.
Its automatically populated with your project name when you create your project with the startproject com-
mand.
CONCURRENT_ITEMS
Default: 100
Maximum number of concurrent items (per response) to process in parallel in the Item Processor (also known as the
Item Pipeline).
CONCURRENT_REQUESTS
Default: 16
The maximum number of concurrent (ie. simultaneous) requests that will be performed by the Scrapy downloader.
CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_DOMAIN
Default: 8
The maximum number of concurrent (ie. simultaneous) requests that will be performed to any single domain.
See also: AutoThrottle extension and its AUTOTHROTTLE_TARGET_CONCURRENCY option.
3.11. Settings 91
CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_IP
Default: 0
The maximum number of concurrent (ie. simultaneous) requests that will be performed to any single IP. If non-
zero, the CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_DOMAIN setting is ignored, and this one is used instead. In other words,
concurrency limits will be applied per IP, not per domain.
This setting also affects DOWNLOAD_DELAY and AutoThrottle extension: if CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_IP is
non-zero, download delay is enforced per IP, not per domain.
DEFAULT_ITEM_CLASS
Default: scrapy.item.Item
The default class that will be used for instantiating items in the the Scrapy shell.
DEFAULT_REQUEST_HEADERS
Default:
{
'Accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
'Accept-Language': 'en',
}
The default headers used for Scrapy HTTP Requests. Theyre populated in the DefaultHeadersMiddleware.
DEPTH_LIMIT
Default: 0
Scope: scrapy.spidermiddlewares.depth.DepthMiddleware
The maximum depth that will be allowed to crawl for any site. If zero, no limit will be imposed.
DEPTH_PRIORITY
Default: 0
An integer that is used to adjust the request priority based on its depth:
if zero (default), no priority adjustment is made from depth
a positive value will decrease the priority, i.e. higher depth requests will be processed later ; this is com-
monly used when doing breadth-first crawls (BFO)
a negative value will increase priority, i.e., higher depth requests will be processed sooner (DFO)
See also: Does Scrapy crawl in breadth-first or depth-first order? about tuning Scrapy for BFO or DFO.
Note: This setting adjusts priority in the opposite way compared to other priority settings
REDIRECT_PRIORITY_ADJUST and RETRY_PRIORITY_ADJUST.

DEPTH_STATS
Default: True
Whether to collect maximum depth stats.
DEPTH_STATS_VERBOSE
Default: False
Whether to collect verbose depth stats. If this is enabled, the number of requests for each depth is collected in the
stats.
DNSCACHE_ENABLED
Default: True
Whether to enable DNS in-memory cache.
DNSCACHE_SIZE
Default: 10000
DNS in-memory cache size.
DNS_TIMEOUT
Default: 60
Timeout for processing of DNS queries in seconds. Float is supported.
DOWNLOADER
Default: scrapy.core.downloader.Downloader
The downloader to use for crawling.
DOWNLOADER_HTTPCLIENTFACTORY
Default: scrapy.core.downloader.webclient.ScrapyHTTPClientFactory
Defines a Twisted protocol.ClientFactory class to use for HTTP/1.0 connections (for
HTTP10DownloadHandler).
Note: HTTP/1.0 is rarely used nowadays so you can safely ignore this setting, unless you use Twisted<11.1, or if you
really want to use HTTP/1.0 and override DOWNLOAD_HANDLERS_BASE for http(s) scheme accordingly, i.e. to
scrapy.core.downloader.handlers.http.HTTP10DownloadHandler.
3.11. Settings 93
DOWNLOADER_CLIENTCONTEXTFACTORY
Default: scrapy.core.downloader.contextfactory.ScrapyClientContextFactory
Represents the classpath to the ContextFactory to use.
Here, ContextFactory is a Twisted term for SSL/TLS contexts, defining the TLS/SSL protocol version to use,
whether to do certificate verification, or even enable client-side authentication (and various other things).
Note: Scrapy default context factory does NOT perform remote server certificate verification. This is usually fine
for web scraping.
If you do need remote server certificate verification enabled, Scrapy also has another context factory class that you can
set, scrapy.core.downloader.contextfactory.BrowserLikeContextFactory, which uses the
platforms certificates to validate remote endpoints. This is only available if you use Twisted>=14.0.
If you do use a custom ContextFactory, make sure it accepts a method parameter at init (this is the OpenSSL.SSL
method mapping DOWNLOADER_CLIENT_TLS_METHOD).
DOWNLOADER_CLIENT_TLS_METHOD
Default: TLS
Use this setting to customize the TLS/SSL method used by the default HTTP/1.1 downloader.
This setting must be one of these string values:
TLS: maps to OpenSSLs TLS_method() (a.k.a SSLv23_method()), which allows protocol negotia-
tion, starting from the highest supported by the platform; default, recommended
TLSv1.0: this value forces HTTPS connections to use TLS version 1.0 ; set this if you want the behavior
of Scrapy<1.1
TLSv1.1: forces TLS version 1.1
TLSv1.2: forces TLS version 1.2
SSLv3: forces SSL version 3 (not recommended)
Note: We recommend that you use PyOpenSSL>=0.13 and Twisted>=0.13 or above (Twisted>=14.0 if you can).
DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES
Default:: {}
A dict containing the downloader middlewares enabled in your project, and their orders. For more info see Activating
a downloader middleware.
DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES_BASE
Default:

{
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.robotstxt.RobotsTxtMiddleware': 100,
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpauth.HttpAuthMiddleware': 300,
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.downloadtimeout.DownloadTimeoutMiddleware': 350,
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.defaultheaders.DefaultHeadersMiddleware': 400,
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.useragent.UserAgentMiddleware': 500,
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.retry.RetryMiddleware': 550,
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.ajaxcrawl.AjaxCrawlMiddleware': 560,
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.redirect.MetaRefreshMiddleware': 580,
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpcompression.HttpCompressionMiddleware': 590,
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.redirect.RedirectMiddleware': 600,
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.cookies.CookiesMiddleware': 700,
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpproxy.HttpProxyMiddleware': 750,
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.stats.DownloaderStats': 850,
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpcache.HttpCacheMiddleware': 900,
}
A dict containing the downloader middlewares enabled by default in Scrapy. Low orders are closer to the en-
gine, high orders are closer to the downloader. You should never modify this setting in your project, modify
DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES instead. For more info see Activating a downloader middleware.
DOWNLOADER_STATS
Default: True
Whether to enable downloader stats collection.
DOWNLOAD_DELAY
Default: 0
The amount of time (in secs) that the downloader should wait before downloading consecutive pages from the same
website. This can be used to throttle the crawling speed to avoid hitting servers too hard. Decimal numbers are
supported. Example:
DOWNLOAD_DELAY = 0.25 # 250 ms of delay
This setting is also affected by the RANDOMIZE_DOWNLOAD_DELAY setting (which is enabled by default). By
default, Scrapy doesnt wait a fixed amount of time between requests, but uses a random interval between 0.5 *
DOWNLOAD_DELAY and 1.5 * DOWNLOAD_DELAY.
When CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_IP is non-zero, delays are enforced per ip address instead of per domain.
You can also change this setting per spider by setting download_delay spider attribute.
DOWNLOAD_HANDLERS
Default: {}
A dict containing the request downloader handlers enabled in your project. See DOWNLOAD_HANDLERS_BASE for
example format.
DOWNLOAD_HANDLERS_BASE
Default:
3.11. Settings 95
{
'file': 'scrapy.core.downloader.handlers.file.FileDownloadHandler',
'http': 'scrapy.core.downloader.handlers.http.HTTPDownloadHandler',
'https': 'scrapy.core.downloader.handlers.http.HTTPDownloadHandler',
's3': 'scrapy.core.downloader.handlers.s3.S3DownloadHandler',
'ftp': 'scrapy.core.downloader.handlers.ftp.FTPDownloadHandler',
}
A dict containing the request download handlers enabled by default in Scrapy. You should never modify this setting in
your project, modify DOWNLOAD_HANDLERS instead.
You can disable any of these download handlers by assigning None to their URI scheme in DOWNLOAD_HANDLERS.
E.g., to disable the built-in FTP handler (without replacement), place this in your settings.py:
DOWNLOAD_HANDLERS = {
'ftp': None,
}
DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT
Default: 180
The amount of time (in secs) that the downloader will wait before timing out.
Note: This timeout can be set per spider using download_timeout spider attribute and per-request using
download_timeout Request.meta key.
DOWNLOAD_MAXSIZE
Default: 1073741824 (1024MB)

The maximum response size (in bytes) that downloader will download.
If you want to disable it set to 0.
Note: This size can be set per spider using download_maxsize spider attribute and per-request using
download_maxsize Request.meta key.
This feature needs Twisted >= 11.1.
DOWNLOAD_WARNSIZE
Default: 33554432 (32MB)

The response size (in bytes) that downloader will start to warn.
If you want to disable it set to 0.
Note: This size can be set per spider using download_warnsize spider attribute and per-request using
download_warnsize Request.meta key.
This feature needs Twisted >= 11.1.

DUPEFILTER_CLASS
Default: scrapy.dupefilters.RFPDupeFilter
The class used to detect and filter duplicate requests.
The default (RFPDupeFilter) filters based on request fingerprint using the
scrapy.utils.request.request_fingerprint function. In order to change the way duplicates are
checked you could subclass RFPDupeFilter and override its request_fingerprint method. This method
should accept scrapy Request object and return its fingerprint (a string).
DUPEFILTER_DEBUG
Default: False
By default, RFPDupeFilter only logs the first duplicate request. Setting DUPEFILTER_DEBUG to True will
make it log all duplicate requests.
EDITOR
Default: depends on the environment

The editor to use for editing spiders with the edit command. It defaults to the EDITOR environment variable, if set.
Otherwise, it defaults to vi (on Unix systems) or the IDLE editor (on Windows).
EXTENSIONS
Default:: {}
A dict containing the extensions enabled in your project, and their orders.
EXTENSIONS_BASE
Default:
{
'scrapy.extensions.corestats.CoreStats': 0,
'scrapy.extensions.telnet.TelnetConsole': 0,
'scrapy.extensions.memusage.MemoryUsage': 0,
'scrapy.extensions.memdebug.MemoryDebugger': 0,
'scrapy.extensions.closespider.CloseSpider': 0,
'scrapy.extensions.feedexport.FeedExporter': 0,
'scrapy.extensions.logstats.LogStats': 0,
'scrapy.extensions.spiderstate.SpiderState': 0,
'scrapy.extensions.throttle.AutoThrottle': 0,
}
A dict containing the extensions available by default in Scrapy, and their orders. This setting contains all stable built-in
extensions. Keep in mind that some of them need to be enabled through a setting.
For more information See the extensions user guide and the list of available extensions.
3.11. Settings 97
FEED_TEMPDIR
The Feed Temp dir allows you to set a custom folder to save crawler temporary files before uploading with FTP feed
storage and Amazon S3.
ITEM_PIPELINES
Default: {}
A dict containing the item pipelines to use, and their orders. Order values are arbitrary, but it is customary to define
them in the 0-1000 range. Lower orders process before higher orders.
Example:
ITEM_PIPELINES = {
'mybot.pipelines.validate.ValidateMyItem': 300,
'mybot.pipelines.validate.StoreMyItem': 800,
}
ITEM_PIPELINES_BASE
Default: {}
A dict containing the pipelines enabled by default in Scrapy. You should never modify this setting in your project,
modify ITEM_PIPELINES instead.
LOG_ENABLED
Default: True
Whether to enable logging.
LOG_ENCODING
Default: utf-8
The encoding to use for logging.
LOG_FILE
Default: None
File name to use for logging output. If None, standard error will be used.
LOG_FORMAT
Default: %(asctime)s [%(name)s] %(levelname)s: %(message)s

String for formatting log messsages. Refer to the Python logging documentation for the whole list of available place-
holders.

LOG_DATEFORMAT
Default: %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S

String for formatting date/time, expansion of the %(asctime)s placeholder in LOG_FORMAT. Refer to the Python
datetime documentation for the whole list of available directives.
LOG_LEVEL
Default: DEBUG
Minimum level to log. Available levels are: CRITICAL, ERROR, WARNING, INFO, DEBUG. For more info see
Logging.
LOG_STDOUT
Default: False
If True, all standard output (and error) of your process will be redirected to the log. For example if you print
hello it will appear in the Scrapy log.
LOG_SHORT_NAMES
Default: False
If True, the logs will just contain the root path. If it is set to False then it displays the component responsible for
the log output
MEMDEBUG_ENABLED
Default: False
Whether to enable memory debugging.
MEMDEBUG_NOTIFY
Default: []
When memory debugging is enabled a memory report will be sent to the specified addresses if this setting is not empty,
otherwise the report will be written to the log.
Example:
MEMDEBUG_NOTIFY = ['[email protected]']
MEMUSAGE_ENABLED
Default: False
Scope: scrapy.extensions.memusage
Whether to enable the memory usage extension that will shutdown the Scrapy process when it exceeds a memory limit,
and also notify by email when that happened.
See Memory usage extension.
3.11. Settings 99
MEMUSAGE_LIMIT_MB
Default: 0
The maximum amount of memory to allow (in megabytes) before shutting down Scrapy (if MEMUSAGE_ENABLED
is True). If zero, no check will be performed.
MEMUSAGE_CHECK_INTERVAL_SECONDS
New in version 1.1.

Default: 60.0
The Memory usage extension checks the current memory usage, versus the limits set by MEMUSAGE_LIMIT_MB and
MEMUSAGE_WARNING_MB, at fixed time intervals.
This sets the length of these intervals, in seconds.
MEMUSAGE_NOTIFY_MAIL
Default: False
A list of emails to notify if the memory limit has been reached.
Example:
MEMUSAGE_NOTIFY_MAIL = ['[email protected]']
MEMUSAGE_REPORT
Default: False
Whether to send a memory usage report after each spider has been closed.
MEMUSAGE_WARNING_MB
Default: 0
The maximum amount of memory to allow (in megabytes) before sending a warning email notifying about it. If zero,
no warning will be produced.

NEWSPIDER_MODULE
Default:
Module where to create new spiders using the genspider command.
Example:
NEWSPIDER_MODULE = 'mybot.spiders_dev'
RANDOMIZE_DOWNLOAD_DELAY
Default: True
If enabled, Scrapy will wait a random amount of time (between 0.5 * DOWNLOAD_DELAY and 1.5 *
DOWNLOAD_DELAY) while fetching requests from the same website.
This randomization decreases the chance of the crawler being detected (and subsequently blocked) by sites which
analyze requests looking for statistically significant similarities in the time between their requests.
The randomization policy is the same used by wget --random-wait option.
If DOWNLOAD_DELAY is zero (default) this option has no effect.
REACTOR_THREADPOOL_MAXSIZE
Default: 10
The maximum limit for Twisted Reactor thread pool size. This is common multi-purpose thread pool used by various
Scrapy components. Threaded DNS Resolver, BlockingFeedStorage, S3FilesStore just to name a few. Increase this
value if youre experiencing problems with insufficient blocking IO.
REDIRECT_MAX_TIMES
Default: 20
Defines the maximum times a request can be redirected. After this maximum the requests response is returned as is.
We used Firefox default value for the same task.
REDIRECT_PRIORITY_ADJUST
Default: +2
Scope: scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.redirect.RedirectMiddleware
Adjust redirect request priority relative to original request:
a positive priority adjust (default) means higher priority.
a negative priority adjust means lower priority.
RETRY_PRIORITY_ADJUST
Default: -1
Scope: scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.retry.RetryMiddleware
Adjust retry request priority relative to original request:
3.11. Settings 101

a positive priority adjust means higher priority.

a negative priority adjust (default) means lower priority.
ROBOTSTXT_OBEY
Default: False
Scope: scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.robotstxt
If enabled, Scrapy will respect robots.txt policies. For more information see RobotsTxtMiddleware.
Note: While the default value is False for historical reasons, this option is enabled by default in settings.py file
generated by scrapy startproject command.
SCHEDULER
Default: scrapy.core.scheduler.Scheduler
The scheduler to use for crawling.
SCHEDULER_DEBUG
Default: False
Setting to True will log debug information about the requests scheduler. This currently logs (only once) if the
requests cannot be serialized to disk. Stats counter (scheduler/unserializable) tracks the number of times
this happens.
Example entry in logs:
1956-01-31 00:00:00+0800 [scrapy.core.scheduler] ERROR: Unable to serialize request:
<GET http://example.com> - reason: cannot serialize <Request at 0x9a7c7ec>
(type Request)> - no more unserializable requests will be logged
(see 'scheduler/unserializable' stats counter)
SCHEDULER_DISK_QUEUE
Default: scrapy.squeues.PickleLifoDiskQueue
Type of disk queue that will be used by scheduler. Other available types are
scrapy.squeues.PickleFifoDiskQueue, scrapy.squeues.MarshalFifoDiskQueue,
scrapy.squeues.MarshalLifoDiskQueue.
SCHEDULER_MEMORY_QUEUE
Default: scrapy.squeues.LifoMemoryQueue
Type of in-memory queue used by scheduler. Other available type is: scrapy.squeues.FifoMemoryQueue.

SCHEDULER_PRIORITY_QUEUE
Default: queuelib.PriorityQueue
Type of priority queue used by scheduler.
SPIDER_CONTRACTS
Default:: {}
A dict containing the spider contracts enabled in your project, used for testing spiders. For more info see Spiders
Contracts.
SPIDER_CONTRACTS_BASE
Default:
{
'scrapy.contracts.default.UrlContract' : 1,
'scrapy.contracts.default.ReturnsContract': 2,
'scrapy.contracts.default.ScrapesContract': 3,
}
A dict containing the scrapy contracts enabled by default in Scrapy. You should never modify this setting in your
project, modify SPIDER_CONTRACTS instead. For more info see Spiders Contracts.
You can disable any of these contracts by assigning None to their class path in SPIDER_CONTRACTS. E.g., to disable
the built-in ScrapesContract, place this in your settings.py:
SPIDER_CONTRACTS = {
'scrapy.contracts.default.ScrapesContract': None,
}
SPIDER_LOADER_CLASS
Default: scrapy.spiderloader.SpiderLoader
The class that will be used for loading spiders, which must implement the SpiderLoader API.
SPIDER_MIDDLEWARES
Default:: {}
A dict containing the spider middlewares enabled in your project, and their orders. For more info see Activating a
spider middleware.
SPIDER_MIDDLEWARES_BASE
Default:
{
'scrapy.spidermiddlewares.httperror.HttpErrorMiddleware': 50,
'scrapy.spidermiddlewares.offsite.OffsiteMiddleware': 500,
'scrapy.spidermiddlewares.referer.RefererMiddleware': 700,
'scrapy.spidermiddlewares.urllength.UrlLengthMiddleware': 800,
3.11. Settings 103

'scrapy.spidermiddlewares.depth.DepthMiddleware': 900,
}
A dict containing the spider middlewares enabled by default in Scrapy, and their orders. Low orders are closer to the
engine, high orders are closer to the spider. For more info see Activating a spider middleware.
SPIDER_MODULES
Default: []
A list of modules where Scrapy will look for spiders.
Example:
SPIDER_MODULES = ['mybot.spiders_prod', 'mybot.spiders_dev']
STATS_CLASS
Default: scrapy.statscollectors.MemoryStatsCollector
The class to use for collecting stats, who must implement the Stats Collector API.
STATS_DUMP
Default: True
Dump the Scrapy stats (to the Scrapy log) once the spider finishes.
For more info see: Stats Collection.
STATSMAILER_RCPTS
Default: [] (empty list)

Send Scrapy stats after spiders finish scraping. See StatsMailer for more info.
TELNETCONSOLE_ENABLED
Default: True
A boolean which specifies if the telnet console will be enabled (provided its extension is also enabled).
TELNETCONSOLE_PORT
Default: [6023, 6073]

The port range to use for the telnet console. If set to None or 0, a dynamically assigned port is used. For more info
see Telnet Console.

TEMPLATES_DIR
Default: templates dir inside scrapy module

The directory where to look for templates when creating new projects with startproject command and new
spiders with genspider command.
The project name must not conflict with the name of custom files or directories in the project subdirectory.
URLLENGTH_LIMIT
Default: 2083
Scope: spidermiddlewares.urllength
The maximum URL length to allow for crawled URLs. For more information about the default value for this setting
see: http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/misc/urllength.html
USER_AGENT
Default: "Scrapy/VERSION (+http://scrapy.org)"

The default User-Agent to use when crawling, unless overridden.
Settings documented elsewhere:
The following settings are documented elsewhere, please check each specific case to see how to enable and use them.
AJAXCRAWL_ENABLED
AUTOTHROTTLE_DEBUG
AUTOTHROTTLE_ENABLED
AUTOTHROTTLE_MAX_DELAY
AUTOTHROTTLE_START_DELAY
AUTOTHROTTLE_TARGET_CONCURRENCY
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
BOT_NAME
CLOSESPIDER_ERRORCOUNT
CLOSESPIDER_ITEMCOUNT
CLOSESPIDER_PAGECOUNT
CLOSESPIDER_TIMEOUT
COMMANDS_MODULE
COMPRESSION_ENABLED
CONCURRENT_ITEMS
CONCURRENT_REQUESTS
3.11. Settings 105

COOKIES_DEBUG
COOKIES_ENABLED
DEFAULT_ITEM_CLASS
DEFAULT_REQUEST_HEADERS
DEPTH_LIMIT
DEPTH_PRIORITY
DEPTH_STATS
DEPTH_STATS_VERBOSE
DNSCACHE_ENABLED
DNSCACHE_SIZE
DNS_TIMEOUT
DOWNLOADER
DOWNLOADER_CLIENTCONTEXTFACTORY
DOWNLOADER_HTTPCLIENTFACTORY
DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES
DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES_BASE
DOWNLOADER_STATS
DOWNLOAD_DELAY
DOWNLOAD_HANDLERS
DOWNLOAD_HANDLERS_BASE
DOWNLOAD_MAXSIZE
DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT
DOWNLOAD_WARNSIZE
DUPEFILTER_CLASS
DUPEFILTER_DEBUG
EDITOR
EXTENSIONS
EXTENSIONS_BASE
FEED_EXPORTERS
FEED_EXPORTERS_BASE
FEED_EXPORT_FIELDS
FEED_FORMAT
FEED_STORAGES

FEED_STORAGES_BASE
FEED_STORE_EMPTY
FEED_TEMPDIR
FEED_URI
FILES_EXPIRES
FILES_RESULT_FIELD
FILES_STORE
FILES_STORE_S3_ACL
FILES_URLS_FIELD
HTTPCACHE_ALWAYS_STORE
HTTPCACHE_DBM_MODULE
HTTPCACHE_DIR
HTTPCACHE_ENABLED
HTTPCACHE_EXPIRATION_SECS
HTTPCACHE_GZIP
HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_HTTP_CODES
HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_MISSING
HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_RESPONSE_CACHE_CONTROLS
HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_SCHEMES
HTTPCACHE_POLICY
HTTPCACHE_STORAGE
HTTPERROR_ALLOWED_CODES
HTTPERROR_ALLOW_ALL
HTTPPROXY_AUTH_ENCODING
IMAGES_EXPIRES
IMAGES_MIN_HEIGHT
IMAGES_MIN_WIDTH
IMAGES_RESULT_FIELD
IMAGES_STORE
IMAGES_STORE_S3_ACL
IMAGES_THUMBS
IMAGES_URLS_FIELD
ITEM_PIPELINES
ITEM_PIPELINES_BASE
LOG_DATEFORMAT
LOG_ENABLED
3.11. Settings 107

LOG_ENCODING
LOG_FILE
LOG_FORMAT
LOG_LEVEL
LOG_SHORT_NAMES
LOG_STDOUT
MAIL_FROM
MAIL_HOST
MAIL_PASS
MAIL_PORT
MAIL_SSL
MAIL_TLS
MAIL_USER
MEMDEBUG_ENABLED
MEMDEBUG_NOTIFY
MEMUSAGE_ENABLED
MEMUSAGE_LIMIT_MB
MEMUSAGE_REPORT
MEMUSAGE_WARNING_MB
METAREFRESH_ENABLED
METAREFRESH_MAXDELAY
NEWSPIDER_MODULE
RANDOMIZE_DOWNLOAD_DELAY
REACTOR_THREADPOOL_MAXSIZE
REDIRECT_ENABLED
REDIRECT_MAX_TIMES
REDIRECT_MAX_TIMES
REDIRECT_PRIORITY_ADJUST
REFERER_ENABLED
RETRY_ENABLED
RETRY_HTTP_CODES
RETRY_PRIORITY_ADJUST
RETRY_TIMES
ROBOTSTXT_OBEY

SCHEDULER
SCHEDULER_DEBUG
SCHEDULER_DISK_QUEUE
SCHEDULER_MEMORY_QUEUE
SCHEDULER_PRIORITY_QUEUE
SPIDER_CONTRACTS
SPIDER_CONTRACTS_BASE
SPIDER_LOADER_CLASS
SPIDER_MIDDLEWARES
SPIDER_MIDDLEWARES_BASE
SPIDER_MODULES
STATSMAILER_RCPTS
STATS_CLASS
STATS_DUMP
TELNETCONSOLE_ENABLED
TELNETCONSOLE_HOST
TELNETCONSOLE_PORT
TELNETCONSOLE_PORT
TEMPLATES_DIR
URLLENGTH_LIMIT
USER_AGENT
3.12 Exceptions
3.12.1 Built-in Exceptions reference
Heres a list of all exceptions included in Scrapy and their usage.
DropItem
exception scrapy.exceptions.DropItem
The exception that must be raised by item pipeline stages to stop processing an Item. For more information see Item
Pipeline.
CloseSpider
exception scrapy.exceptions.CloseSpider(reason=cancelled)
This exception can be raised from a spider callback to request the spider to be closed/stopped. Supported
arguments:
Parameters reason (str) the reason for closing
3.12. Exceptions 109

For example:
def parse_page(self, response):
if 'Bandwidth exceeded' in response.body:
raise CloseSpider('bandwidth_exceeded')
IgnoreRequest
exception scrapy.exceptions.IgnoreRequest
This exception can be raised by the Scheduler or any downloader middleware to indicate that the request should be
ignored.
NotConfigured
exception scrapy.exceptions.NotConfigured
This exception can be raised by some components to indicate that they will remain disabled. Those components
include:
Extensions
Item pipelines
Downloader middlewares
Spider middlewares
The exception must be raised in the components __init__ method.
NotSupported
exception scrapy.exceptions.NotSupported
This exception is raised to indicate an unsupported feature.
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.

CHAPTER 4
Built-in services
4.1 Logging
Note: scrapy.log has been deprecated alongside its functions in favor of explicit calls to the Python standard
logging. Keep reading to learn more about the new logging system.
Scrapy uses Pythons builtin logging system for event logging. Well provide some simple examples to get you started,
but for more advanced use-cases its strongly suggested to read thoroughly its documentation.
Logging works out of the box, and can be configured to some extent with the Scrapy settings listed in Logging settings.
Scrapy calls scrapy.utils.log.configure_logging() to set some reasonable defaults and handle those
settings in Logging settings when running commands, so its recommended to manually call it if youre running Scrapy
from scripts as described in Run Scrapy from a script.
4.1.1 Log levels
Pythons builtin logging defines 5 different levels to indicate severity on a given log message. Here are the standard
ones, listed in decreasing order:
1. logging.CRITICAL - for critical errors (highest severity)
2. logging.ERROR - for regular errors
3. logging.WARNING - for warning messages
4. logging.INFO - for informational messages
5. logging.DEBUG - for debugging messages (lowest severity)
4.1.2 How to log messages
Heres a quick example of how to log a message using the logging.WARNING level:
import logging
logging.warning("This is a warning")
There are shortcuts for issuing log messages on any of the standard 5 levels, and theres also a general logging.log
method which takes a given level as argument. If you need so, last example could be rewrote as:
111
import logging
logging.log(logging.WARNING, "This is a warning")
On top of that, you can create different loggers to encapsulate messages (For example, a common practice its to
create different loggers for every module). These loggers can be configured independently, and they allow hierarchical
constructions.
Last examples use the root logger behind the scenes, which is a top level logger where all messages are propagated
to (unless otherwise specified). Using logging helpers is merely a shortcut for getting the root logger explicitly, so
this is also an equivalent of last snippets:
import logging
logger = logging.getLogger()
logger.warning("This is a warning")
You can use a different logger just by getting its name with the logging.getLogger function:
import logging
logger = logging.getLogger('mycustomlogger')
Finally, you can ensure having a custom logger for any module youre working on by using the __name__ variable,
which is populated with current modules path:
import logging
logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)
See also:
Module logging, HowTo Basic Logging Tutorial
Module logging, Loggers Further documentation on loggers
4.1.3 Logging from Spiders
Scrapy provides a logger within each Spider instance, that can be accessed and used like this:
import scrapy
name = 'myspider'
start_urls = ['http://scrapinghub.com']

self.logger.info('Parse function called on %s', response.url)
That logger is created using the Spiders name, but you can use any custom Python logger you want. For example:
import logging
import scrapy
logger = logging.getLogger('mycustomlogger')
name = 'myspider'
start_urls = ['http://scrapinghub.com']
112 Chapter 4. Built-in services


logger.info('Parse function called on %s', response.url)
4.1.4 Logging configuration
Loggers on their own dont manage how messages sent through them are displayed. For this task, different handlers
can be attached to any logger instance and they will redirect those messages to appropriate destinations, such as the
standard output, files, emails, etc.
By default, Scrapy sets and configures a handler for the root logger, based on the settings below.
Logging settings
These settings can be used to configure the logging:

LOG_FILE
LOG_ENABLED
LOG_ENCODING
LOG_LEVEL
LOG_FORMAT
LOG_DATEFORMAT
LOG_STDOUT
LOG_SHORT_NAMES
The first couple of settings define a destination for log messages. If LOG_FILE is set, messages sent through the root
logger will be redirected to a file named LOG_FILE with encoding LOG_ENCODING. If unset and LOG_ENABLED
is True, log messages will be displayed on the standard error. Lastly, if LOG_ENABLED is False, there wont be
any visible log output.
LOG_LEVEL determines the minimum level of severity to display, those messages with lower severity will be filtered
out. It ranges through the possible levels listed in Log levels.
LOG_FORMAT and LOG_DATEFORMAT specify formatting strings used as layouts for all messages. Those strings can
contain any placeholders listed in loggings logrecord attributes docs and datetimes strftime and strptime directives
respectively.
If LOG_SHORT_NAMES is set, then the logs will not display the scrapy component that prints the log. It is unset by
default, hence logs contain the scrapy component responsible for that log output.
Command-line options
There are command-line arguments, available for all commands, that you can use to override some of the Scrapy
settings regarding logging.
--logfile FILE Overrides LOG_FILE
--loglevel/-L LEVEL Overrides LOG_LEVEL
--nolog Sets LOG_ENABLED to False
See also:
Module logging.handlers Further documentation on available handlers
4.1. Logging 113

Advanced customization
Because Scrapy uses stdlib logging module, you can customize logging using all features of stdlib logging.
For example, lets say youre scraping a website which returns many HTTP 404 and 500 responses, and you want to
hide all messages like this:
2016-12-16 22:00:06 [scrapy.spidermiddlewares.httperror] INFO: Ignoring
response <500 http://quotes.toscrape.com/page/1-34/>: HTTP status code
is not handled or not allowed
The first thing to note is a logger name - it is in brackets: [scrapy.spidermiddlewares.httperror]. If

you get just [scrapy] then LOG_SHORT_NAMES is likely set to True; set it to False and re-run the crawl.
Next, we can see that the message has INFO level. To hide it we should set logging level for
scrapy.spidermiddlewares.httperror higher than INFO; next level after INFO is WARNING. It could
be done e.g. in the spiders __init__ method:
import logging
import scrapy
# ...
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
logger = logging.getLogger('scrapy.spidermiddlewares.httperror')
logger.setLevel(logging.WARNING)
super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
If you run this spider again then INFO messages from scrapy.spidermiddlewares.httperror logger will
be gone.
4.1.5 scrapy.utils.log module
scrapy.utils.log.configure_logging(settings=None, install_root_handler=True)
Initialize logging defaults for Scrapy.
Parameters
settings (dict, Settings object or None) settings used to create and configure a
handler for the root logger (default: None).
install_root_handler (bool) whether to install root logging handler (default:
True)
This function does:
Route warnings and twisted logging through Python standard logging
Assign DEBUG and ERROR level to Scrapy and Twisted loggers respectively
Route stdout to log if LOG_STDOUT setting is True
When install_root_handler is True (default), this function also creates a handler for the root logger
according to given settings (see Logging settings). You can override default options using settings argument.
When settings is empty or None, defaults are used.
configure_logging is automatically called when using Scrapy commands, but needs to be called explicitly
when running custom scripts. In that case, its usage is not required but its recommended.

If you plan on configuring the handlers yourself is still recommended you call this function, passing in-
stall_root_handler=False. Bear in mind there wont be any log output set by default in that case.
To get you started on manually configuring loggings output, you can use logging.basicConfig() to set a basic
root handler. This is an example on how to redirect INFO or higher messages to a file:
import logging
from scrapy.utils.log import configure_logging
configure_logging(install_root_handler=False)
logging.basicConfig(
filename='log.txt',
format='%(levelname)s: %(message)s',
level=logging.INFO
)
Refer to Run Scrapy from a script for more details about using Scrapy this way.
4.2 Stats Collection
Scrapy provides a convenient facility for collecting stats in the form of key/values, where values are often counters.
The facility is called the Stats Collector, and can be accessed through the stats attribute of the Crawler API, as
illustrated by the examples in the Common Stats Collector uses section below.
However, the Stats Collector is always available, so you can always import it in your module and use its API (to
increment or set new stat keys), regardless of whether the stats collection is enabled or not. If its disabled, the API
will still work but it wont collect anything. This is aimed at simplifying the stats collector usage: you should spend
no more than one line of code for collecting stats in your spider, Scrapy extension, or whatever code youre using the
Stats Collector from.
Another feature of the Stats Collector is that its very efficient (when enabled) and extremely efficient (almost unno-
ticeable) when disabled.
The Stats Collector keeps a stats table per open spider which is automatically opened when the spider is opened, and
closed when the spider is closed.
4.2.1 Common Stats Collector uses
Access the stats collector through the stats attribute. Here is an example of an extension that access stats:
class ExtensionThatAccessStats(object):
def __init__(self, stats):

self.stats = stats
@classmethod
return cls(crawler.stats)
Set stat value:

stats.set_value('hostname', socket.gethostname())
Increment stat value:

stats.inc_value('custom_count')
4.2. Stats Collection 115

Set stat value only if greater than previous:

stats.max_value('max_items_scraped', value)
Set stat value only if lower than previous:

stats.min_value('min_free_memory_percent', value)
Get stat value:

>>> stats.get_value('custom_count')
1
Get all stats:

>>> stats.get_stats()
{'custom_count': 1, 'start_time': datetime.datetime(2009, 7, 14, 21, 47, 28, 977139)}
4.2.2 Available Stats Collectors
Besides the basic StatsCollector there are other Stats Collectors available in Scrapy which extend the basic Stats
Collector. You can select which Stats Collector to use through the STATS_CLASS setting. The default Stats Collector
used is the MemoryStatsCollector.
MemoryStatsCollector
class scrapy.statscollectors.MemoryStatsCollector
A simple stats collector that keeps the stats of the last scraping run (for each spider) in memory, after theyre
closed. The stats can be accessed through the spider_stats attribute, which is a dict keyed by spider domain
name.
This is the default Stats Collector used in Scrapy.
spider_stats
A dict of dicts (keyed by spider name) containing the stats of the last scraping run for each spider.
DummyStatsCollector
class scrapy.statscollectors.DummyStatsCollector
A Stats collector which does nothing but is very efficient (because it does nothing). This stats collector can
be set via the STATS_CLASS setting, to disable stats collect in order to improve performance. However, the
performance penalty of stats collection is usually marginal compared to other Scrapy workload like parsing
pages.
4.3 Sending e-mail
Although Python makes sending e-mails relatively easy via the smtplib library, Scrapy provides its own facility for
sending e-mails which is very easy to use and its implemented using Twisted non-blocking IO, to avoid interfering
with the non-blocking IO of the crawler. It also provides a simple API for sending attachments and its very easy to
configure, with a few settings.

4.3.1 Quick example
There are two ways to instantiate the mail sender. You can instantiate it using the standard constructor:
from scrapy.mail import MailSender
mailer = MailSender()
Or you can instantiate it passing a Scrapy settings object, which will respect the settings:
mailer = MailSender.from_settings(settings)
And here is how to use it to send an e-mail (without attachments):

mailer.send(to=["[email protected]"], subject="Some subject", body="Some body", cc=["another@exampl
4.3.2 MailSender class reference
MailSender is the preferred class to use for sending emails from Scrapy, as it uses Twisted non-blocking IO, like the
rest of the framework.
class scrapy.mail.MailSender(smtphost=None, mailfrom=None, smtpuser=None, smtppass=None,
smtpport=None)
Parameters
smtphost (str) the SMTP host to use for sending the emails. If omitted, the
MAIL_HOST setting will be used.
mailfrom (str) the address used to send emails (in the From: header). If omitted, the
MAIL_FROM setting will be used.
smtpuser the SMTP user. If omitted, the MAIL_USER setting will be used. If not given,
no SMTP authentication will be performed.
smtppass (str) the SMTP pass for authentication.
smtpport (int) the SMTP port to connect to
smtptls (boolean) enforce using SMTP STARTTLS
smtpssl (boolean) enforce using a secure SSL connection
classmethod from_settings(settings)
Instantiate using a Scrapy settings object, which will respect these Scrapy settings.
Parameters settings (scrapy.settings.Settings object) the e-mail recipients
send(to, subject, body, cc=None, attachs=(), mimetype=text/plain, charset=None)
Send email to the given recipients.
Parameters
to (str or list of str) the e-mail recipients
subject (str) the subject of the e-mail
cc (str or list of str) the e-mails to CC
body (str) the e-mail body
attachs (iterable) an iterable of tuples (attach_name, mimetype,
file_object) where attach_name is a string with the name that will appear on the
e-mails attachment, mimetype is the mimetype of the attachment and file_object
is a readable file object with the contents of the attachment
4.3. Sending e-mail 117

mimetype (str) the MIME type of the e-mail

charset (str) the character encoding to use for the e-mail contents
4.3.3 Mail settings
These settings define the default constructor values of the MailSender class, and can be used to configure e-mail
notifications in your project without writing any code (for those extensions and code that uses MailSender).
MAIL_FROM
Default: scrapy@localhost
Sender email to use (From: header) for sending emails.
MAIL_HOST
Default: localhost
SMTP host to use for sending emails.
MAIL_PORT
Default: 25
SMTP port to use for sending emails.
MAIL_USER
Default: None
User to use for SMTP authentication. If disabled no SMTP authentication will be performed.
MAIL_PASS
Default: None
Password to use for SMTP authentication, along with MAIL_USER.
MAIL_TLS
Default: False
Enforce using STARTTLS. STARTTLS is a way to take an existing insecure connection, and upgrade it to a secure
connection using SSL/TLS.
MAIL_SSL
Default: False
Enforce connecting using an SSL encrypted connection

4.4 Telnet Console
Scrapy comes with a built-in telnet console for inspecting and controlling a Scrapy running process. The telnet console
is just a regular python shell running inside the Scrapy process, so you can do literally anything from it.
The telnet console is a built-in Scrapy extension which comes enabled by default, but you can also disable it if you
want. For more information about the extension itself see Telnet console extension.
4.4.1 How to access the telnet console
The telnet console listens in the TCP port defined in the TELNETCONSOLE_PORT setting, which defaults to 6023.
To access the console you need to type:
telnet localhost 6023
>>>
You need the telnet program which comes installed by default in Windows, and most Linux distros.
4.4.2 Available variables in the telnet console
The telnet console is like a regular Python shell running inside the Scrapy process, so you can do anything from it
including importing new modules, etc.
However, the telnet console comes with some default variables defined for convenience:
Shortcut Description
crawler the Scrapy Crawler (scrapy.crawler.Crawler object)
engine Crawler.engine attribute
spider the active spider
slot the engine slot
extensions the Extension Manager (Crawler.extensions attribute)
stats the Stats Collector (Crawler.stats attribute)
settings the Scrapy settings object (Crawler.settings attribute)
est print a report of the engine status
prefs for memory debugging (see Debugging memory leaks)
p a shortcut to the pprint.pprint function
hpy for memory debugging (see Debugging memory leaks)
4.4.3 Telnet console usage examples
Here are some example tasks you can do with the telnet console:
View engine status
You can use the est() method of the Scrapy engine to quickly show its state using the telnet console:
>>> est()
Execution engine status
time()-engine.start_time : 8.62972998619
engine.has_capacity() : False
len(engine.downloader.active) : 16
4.4. Telnet Console 119

engine.scraper.is_idle() : False
engine.spider.name : followall
engine.spider_is_idle(engine.spider) : False
engine.slot.closing : False
len(engine.slot.inprogress) : 16
len(engine.slot.scheduler.dqs or []) : 0
len(engine.slot.scheduler.mqs) : 92
len(engine.scraper.slot.queue) : 0
len(engine.scraper.slot.active) : 0
engine.scraper.slot.active_size : 0
engine.scraper.slot.itemproc_size : 0
engine.scraper.slot.needs_backout() : False
Pause, resume and stop the Scrapy engine
To pause:
>>> engine.pause()
>>>
To resume:
>>> engine.unpause()
>>>
To stop:
>>> engine.stop()
Connection closed by foreign host.
4.4.4 Telnet Console signals
scrapy.extensions.telnet.update_telnet_vars(telnet_vars)
Sent just before the telnet console is opened. You can hook up to this signal to add, remove or update the
variables that will be available in the telnet local namespace. In order to do that, you need to update the
telnet_vars dict in your handler.
Parameters telnet_vars (dict) the dict of telnet variables
4.4.5 Telnet settings
These are the settings that control the telnet consoles behaviour:
TELNETCONSOLE_PORT
Default: [6023, 6073]

The port range to use for the telnet console. If set to None or 0, a dynamically assigned port is used.

TELNETCONSOLE_HOST
Default: 127.0.0.1
The interface the telnet console should listen on
4.5 Web Service
webservice has been moved into a separate project.

It is hosted at:
https://github.com/scrapy-plugins/scrapy-jsonrpc
Logging Learn how to use Pythons 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.
4.5. Web Service 121


CHAPTER 5
Solving specific problems
5.1 Frequently Asked Questions
5.1.1 How does Scrapy compare to BeautifulSoup or lxml?
BeautifulSoup and lxml are libraries for parsing HTML and XML. Scrapy is an application framework for writing
web spiders that crawl web sites and extract data from them.
Scrapy provides a built-in mechanism for extracting data (called selectors) but you can easily use BeautifulSoup (or
lxml) instead, if you feel more comfortable working with them. After all, theyre just parsing libraries which can be
imported and used from any Python code.
In other words, comparing BeautifulSoup (or lxml) to Scrapy is like comparing jinja2 to Django.
5.1.2 Can I use Scrapy with BeautifulSoup?
Yes, you can. As mentioned above, BeautifulSoup can be used for parsing HTML responses in Scrapy callbacks. You
just have to feed the responses body into a BeautifulSoup object and extract whatever data you need from it.
Heres an example spider using BeautifulSoup API, with lxml as the HTML parser:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import scrapy
class ExampleSpider(scrapy.Spider):
name = "example"
allowed_domains = ["example.com"]
start_urls = (
'http://www.example.com/',
)

# use lxml to get decent HTML parsing speed
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'lxml')
yield {
"url": response.url,
"title": soup.h1.string
}
123
Note: BeautifulSoup supports several HTML/XML parsers. See BeautifulSoups official documentation on
which ones are available.
5.1.3 What Python versions does Scrapy support?
Scrapy is supported under Python 2.7 and Python 3.3+. Python 2.6 support was dropped starting at Scrapy 0.20.
Python 3 support was added in Scrapy 1.1.
Note: Python 3 is not yet supported on Windows.
5.1.4 Did Scrapy steal X from Django?
Probably, but we dont like that word. We think Django is a great open source project and an example to follow, so
weve used it as an inspiration for Scrapy.
We believe that, if something is already done well, theres no need to reinvent it. This concept, besides being one of
the foundations for open source and free software, not only applies to software but also to documentation, procedures,
policies, etc. So, instead of going through each problem ourselves, we choose to copy ideas from those projects that
have already solved them properly, and focus on the real problems we need to solve.
Wed be proud if Scrapy serves as an inspiration for other projects. Feel free to steal from us!
5.1.5 Does Scrapy work with HTTP proxies?
Yes. Support for HTTP proxies is provided (since Scrapy 0.8) through the HTTP Proxy downloader middleware. See
HttpProxyMiddleware.
5.1.6 How can I scrape an item with attributes in different pages?
See Passing additional data to callback functions.
5.1.7 Scrapy crashes with: ImportError: No module named win32api
You need to install pywin32 because of this Twisted bug.
5.1.8 How can I simulate a user login in my spider?
See Using FormRequest.from_response() to simulate a user login.
5.1.9 Does Scrapy crawl in breadth-first or depth-first order?
By default, Scrapy uses a LIFO queue for storing pending requests, which basically means that it crawls in DFO order.
This order is more convenient in most cases. If you do want to crawl in true BFO order, you can do it by setting the
following settings:
124 Chapter 5. Solving specific problems

DEPTH_PRIORITY = 1
SCHEDULER_DISK_QUEUE = 'scrapy.squeues.PickleFifoDiskQueue'
SCHEDULER_MEMORY_QUEUE = 'scrapy.squeues.FifoMemoryQueue'
5.1.10 My Scrapy crawler has memory leaks. What can I do?
See Debugging memory leaks.

Also, Python has a builtin memory leak issue which is described in Leaks without leaks.
5.1.11 How can I make Scrapy consume less memory?
See previous question.
5.1.12 Can I use Basic HTTP Authentication in my spiders?
Yes, see HttpAuthMiddleware.
5.1.13 Why does Scrapy download pages in English instead of my native lan-
guage?
Try changing the default Accept-Language request header by overriding the DEFAULT_REQUEST_HEADERS setting.
5.1.14 Where can I find some example Scrapy projects?
See Examples.
5.1.15 Can I run a spider without creating a project?
Yes. You can use the runspider command. For example, if you have a spider written in a my_spider.py file
you can run it with:
scrapy runspider my_spider.py
See runspider command for more info.
5.1.16 I get Filtered offsite request messages. How can I fix them?
Those messages (logged with DEBUG level) dont necessarily mean there is a problem, so you may not need to fix
them.
Those messages are thrown by the Offsite Spider Middleware, which is a spider middleware (enabled by default)
whose purpose is to filter out requests to domains outside the ones covered by the spider.
For more info see: OffsiteMiddleware.
5.1.17 What is the recommended way to deploy a Scrapy crawler in production?
See Deploying Spiders.
5.1. Frequently Asked Questions 125

5.1.18 Can I use JSON for large exports?
Itll depend on how large your output is. See this warning in JsonItemExporter documentation.
5.1.19 Can I return (Twisted) deferreds from signal handlers?
Some signals support returning deferreds from their handlers, others dont. See the Built-in signals reference to know
which ones.
5.1.20 What does the response status code 999 means?
999 is a custom response status code used by Yahoo sites to throttle requests. Try slowing down the crawling speed
by using a download delay of 2 (or higher) in your spider:
name = 'myspider'
download_delay = 2
# [ ... rest of the spider code ... ]
Or by setting a global download delay in your project with the DOWNLOAD_DELAY setting.
5.1.21 Can I call pdb.set_trace() from my spiders to debug them?
Yes, but you can also use the Scrapy shell which allows you to quickly analyze (and even modify) the response being
processed by your spider, which is, quite often, more useful than plain old pdb.set_trace().
For more info see Invoking the shell from spiders to inspect responses.
5.1.22 Simplest way to dump all my scraped items into a JSON/CSV/XML file?
To dump into a JSON file:

scrapy crawl myspider -o items.json
To dump into a CSV file:

scrapy crawl myspider -o items.csv
To dump into a XML file:

scrapy crawl myspider -o items.xml
For more information see Feed exports
5.1.23 Whats this huge cryptic __VIEWSTATE parameter used in some forms?
The __VIEWSTATE parameter is used in sites built with ASP.NET/VB.NET. For more info on how it works see this
page. Also, heres an example spider which scrapes one of these sites.

5.1.24 Whats the best way to parse big XML/CSV data feeds?
Parsing big feeds with XPath selectors can be problematic since they need to build the DOM of the entire feed in
memory, and this can be quite slow and consume a lot of memory.
In order to avoid parsing all the entire feed at once in memory, you can use the functions xmliter and csviter
from scrapy.utils.iterators module. In fact, this is what the feed spiders (see Spiders) use under the cover.
5.1.25 Does Scrapy manage cookies automatically?
Yes, Scrapy receives and keeps track of cookies sent by servers, and sends them back on subsequent requests, like any
regular web browser does.
For more info see Requests and Responses and CookiesMiddleware.
5.1.26 How can I see the cookies being sent and received from Scrapy?
Enable the COOKIES_DEBUG setting.
5.1.27 How can I instruct a spider to stop itself?
Raise the CloseSpider exception from a callback. For more info see: CloseSpider.
5.1.28 How can I prevent my Scrapy bot from getting banned?
See Avoiding getting banned.
5.1.29 Should I use spider arguments or settings to configure my spider?
Both spider arguments and settings can be used to configure your spider. There is no strict rule that mandates to use
one or the other, but settings are more suited for parameters that, once set, dont change much, while spider arguments
are meant to change more often, even on each spider run and sometimes are required for the spider to run at all (for
example, to set the start url of a spider).
To illustrate with an example, assuming you have a spider that needs to log into a site to scrape data, and you only
want to scrape data from a certain section of the site (which varies each time). In that case, the credentials to log in
would be settings, while the url of the section to scrape would be a spider argument.
5.1.30 Im scraping a XML document and my XPath selector doesnt return any
items
You may need to remove namespaces. See Removing namespaces.
5.2 Debugging Spiders
This document explains the most common techniques for debugging spiders. Consider the following scrapy spider
below:
5.2. Debugging Spiders 127

import scrapy
from myproject.items import MyItem
name = 'myspider'
start_urls = (
'http://example.com/page1',
'http://example.com/page2',
)

# collect ìtem_urls`
for item_url in item_urls:
yield scrapy.Request(item_url, self.parse_item)

item = MyItem()
# populate ìtem` fields
# and extract item_details_url
yield scrapy.Request(item_details_url, self.parse_details, meta={'item': item})
def parse_details(self, response):

item = response.meta['item']
# populate more ìtem` fields
return item
Basically this is a simple spider which parses two pages of items (the start_urls). Items also have a details page with
additional information, so we use the meta functionality of Request to pass a partially populated item.
5.2.1 Parse Command
The most basic way of checking the output of your spider is to use the parse command. It allows to check the
behaviour of different parts of the spider at the method level. It has the advantage of being flexible and simple to use,
but does not allow debugging code inside a method.
In order to see the item scraped from a specific url:
$ scrapy parse --spider=myspider -c parse_item -d 2 <item_url>
>>> STATUS DEPTH LEVEL 2 <<<

# Scraped Items ------------------------------------------------------------
[{'url': <item_url>}]
# Requests -----------------------------------------------------------------
[]
Using the --verbose or -v option we can see the status at each depth level:
$ scrapy parse --spider=myspider -c parse_item -d 2 -v <item_url>
>>> DEPTH LEVEL: 1 <<<

# Scraped Items ------------------------------------------------------------
[]
# Requests -----------------------------------------------------------------
[<GET item_details_url>]

>>> DEPTH LEVEL: 2 <<<

# Scraped Items ------------------------------------------------------------
[{'url': <item_url>}]
# Requests -----------------------------------------------------------------
[]
Checking items scraped from a single start_url, can also be easily achieved using:
$ scrapy parse --spider=myspider -d 3 'http://example.com/page1'
5.2.2 Scrapy Shell
While the parse command is very useful for checking behaviour of a spider, it is of little help to check what hap-
pens inside a callback, besides showing the response received and the output. How to debug the situation when
parse_details sometimes receives no item?
Fortunately, the shell is your bread and butter in this case (see Invoking the shell from spiders to inspect responses):
from scrapy.shell import inspect_response

item = response.meta.get('item', None)
if item:
return item
else:
inspect_response(response, self)
See also: Invoking the shell from spiders to inspect responses.
5.2.3 Open in browser
Sometimes you just want to see how a certain response looks in a browser, you can use the open_in_browser
function for that. Here is an example of how you would use it:
from scrapy.utils.response import open_in_browser

if "item name" not in response.body:
open_in_browser(response)
open_in_browser will open a browser with the response received by Scrapy at that point, adjusting the base tag
so that images and styles are displayed properly.
5.2.4 Logging
Logging is another useful option for getting information about your spider run. Although not as convenient, it comes
with the advantage that the logs will be available in all future runs should they be necessary again:
item = response.meta.get('item', None)
if item:
5.2. Debugging Spiders 129


return item
else:
self.logger.warning('No item received for %s', response.url)
For more information, check the Logging section.
5.3 Spiders Contracts
Note: This is a new feature (introduced in Scrapy 0.15) and may be subject to minor functionality/API updates.
Check the release notes to be notified of updates.
Testing spiders can get particularly annoying and while nothing prevents you from writing unit tests the task gets
cumbersome quickly. Scrapy offers an integrated way of testing your spiders by the means of contracts.
This allows you to test each callback of your spider by hardcoding a sample url and check various constraints for
how the callback processes the response. Each contract is prefixed with an @ and included in the docstring. See the
following example:
""" This function parses a sample response. Some contracts are mingled
with this docstring.
@url http://www.amazon.com/s?field-keywords=selfish+gene
@returns items 1 16
@returns requests 0 0
@scrapes Title Author Year Price
"""
This callback is tested using three built-in contracts:

class scrapy.contracts.default.UrlContract
This contract (@url) sets the sample url used when checking other contract conditions for this spider. This
contract is mandatory. All callbacks lacking this contract are ignored when running the checks:
@url url
class scrapy.contracts.default.ReturnsContract
This contract (@returns) sets lower and upper bounds for the items and requests returned by the spider. The
upper bound is optional:
@returns item(s)|request(s) [min [max]]
class scrapy.contracts.default.ScrapesContract
This contract (@scrapes) checks that all the items returned by the callback have the specified fields:
@scrapes field_1 field_2 ...
Use the check command to run the contract checks.

5.3.1 Custom Contracts
If you find you need more power than the built-in scrapy contracts you can create and load your own contracts in the
project by using the SPIDER_CONTRACTS setting:
SPIDER_CONTRACTS = {
'myproject.contracts.ResponseCheck': 10,
'myproject.contracts.ItemValidate': 10,
}
Each contract must inherit from scrapy.contracts.Contract and can override three methods:
class scrapy.contracts.Contract(method, *args)
Parameters
method (function) callback function to which the contract is associated
args (list) list of arguments passed into the docstring (whitespace separated)
adjust_request_args(args)
This receives a dict as an argument containing default arguments for Request object. Must return the
same or a modified version of it.
pre_process(response)
This allows hooking in various checks on the response received from the sample request, before its being
passed to the callback.
post_process(output)
This allows processing the output of the callback. Iterators are converted listified before being passed to
this hook.
Here is a demo contract which checks the presence of a custom header in the response received. Raise
scrapy.exceptions.ContractFail in order to get the failures pretty printed:
from scrapy.contracts import Contract
from scrapy.exceptions import ContractFail
class HasHeaderContract(Contract):
""" Demo contract which checks the presence of a custom header
@has_header X-CustomHeader
"""
name = 'has_header'
def pre_process(self, response):

for header in self.args:
if header not in response.headers:
raise ContractFail('X-CustomHeader not present')
5.4 Common Practices
This section documents common practices when using Scrapy. These are things that cover many topics and dont often
fall into any other specific section.
5.4.1 Run Scrapy from a script
You can use the API to run Scrapy from a script, instead of the typical way of running Scrapy via scrapy crawl.
5.4. Common Practices 131

Remember that Scrapy is built on top of the Twisted asynchronous networking library, so you need to run it inside the
Twisted reactor.
The first utility you can use to run your spiders is scrapy.crawler.CrawlerProcess. This class will start
a Twisted reactor for you, configuring the logging and setting shutdown handlers. This class is the one used by all
Scrapy commands.
Heres an example showing how to run a single spider with it.
import scrapy
from scrapy.crawler import CrawlerProcess
# Your spider definition
...
process = CrawlerProcess({
'USER_AGENT': 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)'
})
process.crawl(MySpider)
process.start() # the script will block here until the crawling is finished
Make sure to check CrawlerProcess documentation to get acquainted with its usage details.
If you are inside a Scrapy project there are some additional helpers you can use to import those components
within the project. You can automatically import your spiders passing their name to CrawlerProcess, and use
get_project_settings to get a Settings instance with your project settings.
What follows is a working example of how to do that, using the testspiders project as example.
from scrapy.utils.project import get_project_settings
process = CrawlerProcess(get_project_settings())
# 'followall' is the name of one of the spiders of the project.

process.crawl('followall', domain='scrapinghub.com')
process.start() # the script will block here until the crawling is finished
Theres another Scrapy utility that provides more control over the crawling process:
scrapy.crawler.CrawlerRunner. This class is a thin wrapper that encapsulates some simple helpers
to run multiple crawlers, but it wont start or interfere with existing reactors in any way.
Using this class the reactor should be explicitly run after scheduling your spiders. Its recommended you use
CrawlerRunner instead of CrawlerProcess if your application is already using Twisted and you want to run
Scrapy in the same reactor.
Note that you will also have to shutdown the Twisted reactor yourself after the spider is finished. This can be achieved
by adding callbacks to the deferred returned by the CrawlerRunner.crawl method.
Heres an example of its usage, along with a callback to manually stop the reactor after MySpider has finished running.
from twisted.internet import reactor
import scrapy
from scrapy.crawler import CrawlerRunner
# Your spider definition
...

configure_logging({'LOG_FORMAT': '%(levelname)s: %(message)s'})

runner = CrawlerRunner()
d = runner.crawl(MySpider)
d.addBoth(lambda _: reactor.stop())
reactor.run() # the script will block here until the crawling is finished
See also:
Twisted Reactor Overview.
5.4.2 Running multiple spiders in the same process
By default, Scrapy runs a single spider per process when you run scrapy crawl. However, Scrapy supports running
multiple spiders per process using the internal API.
Here is an example that runs multiple spiders simultaneously:
import scrapy
class MySpider1(scrapy.Spider):
# Your first spider definition
...
# Your second spider definition
...
process = CrawlerProcess()
process.crawl(MySpider1)
process.crawl(MySpider2)
process.start() # the script will block here until all crawling jobs are finished
Same example using CrawlerRunner:

import scrapy
from twisted.internet import reactor
...
...
configure_logging()
runner.crawl(MySpider1)
runner.crawl(MySpider2)
d = runner.join()
d.addBoth(lambda _: reactor.stop())
reactor.run() # the script will block here until all crawling jobs are finished
5.4. Common Practices 133

Same example but running the spiders sequentially by chaining the deferreds:
from twisted.internet import reactor, defer
...
...
configure_logging()
@defer.inlineCallbacks
def crawl():
yield runner.crawl(MySpider1)
yield runner.crawl(MySpider2)
reactor.stop()
crawl()
reactor.run() # the script will block here until the last crawl call is finished
See also:
Run Scrapy from a script.
5.4.3 Distributed crawls
Scrapy doesnt provide any built-in facility for running crawls in a distribute (multi-server) manner. However, there
are some ways to distribute crawls, which vary depending on how you plan to distribute them.
If you have many spiders, the obvious way to distribute the load is to setup many Scrapyd instances and distribute
spider runs among those.
If you instead want to run a single (big) spider through many machines, what you usually do is partition the urls to
crawl and send them to each separate spider. Here is a concrete example:
First, you prepare the list of urls to crawl and put them into separate files/urls:
http://somedomain.com/urls-to-crawl/spider1/part1.list
Then you fire a spider run on 3 different Scrapyd servers. The spider would receive a (spider) argument part with
the number of the partition to crawl:
curl http://scrapy1.mycompany.com:6800/schedule.json -d project=myproject -d spider=spider1 -d part=1
5.4.4 Avoiding getting banned
Some websites implement certain measures to prevent bots from crawling them, with varying degrees of sophistication.
Getting around those measures can be difficult and tricky, and may sometimes require special infrastructure. Please

consider contacting commercial support if in doubt.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when dealing with these kinds of sites:
rotate your user agent from a pool of well-known ones from browsers (google around to get a list of them)
disable cookies (see COOKIES_ENABLED) as some sites may use cookies to spot bot behaviour
use download delays (2 or higher). See DOWNLOAD_DELAY setting.
if possible, use Google cache to fetch pages, instead of hitting the sites directly
use a pool of rotating IPs. For example, the free Tor project or paid services like ProxyMesh. An open source
alterantive is scrapoxy, a super proxy that you can attach your own proxies to.
use a highly distributed downloader that circumvents bans internally, so you can just focus on parsing clean
pages. One example of such downloaders is Crawlera
If you are still unable to prevent your bot getting banned, consider contacting commercial support.
5.5 Broad Crawls
Scrapy defaults are optimized for crawling specific sites. These sites are often handled by a single Scrapy spider,
although this is not necessary or required (for example, there are generic spiders that handle any given site thrown at
them).
In addition to this focused crawl, there is another common type of crawling which covers a large (potentially un-
limited) number of domains, and is only limited by time or other arbitrary constraint, rather than stopping when the
domain was crawled to completion or when there are no more requests to perform. These are called broad crawls
and is the typical crawlers employed by search engines.
These are some common properties often found in broad crawls:
they crawl many domains (often, unbounded) instead of a specific set of sites
they dont necessarily crawl domains to completion, because it would impractical (or impossible) to do so, and
instead limit the crawl by time or number of pages crawled
they are simpler in logic (as opposed to very complex spiders with many extraction rules) because data is often
post-processed in a separate stage
they crawl many domains concurrently, which allows them to achieve faster crawl speeds by not being limited
by any particular site constraint (each site is crawled slowly to respect politeness, but many sites are crawled in
parallel)
As said above, Scrapy default settings are optimized for focused crawls, not broad crawls. However, due to its asyn-
chronous architecture, Scrapy is very well suited for performing fast broad crawls. This page summarizes some things
you need to keep in mind when using Scrapy for doing broad crawls, along with concrete suggestions of Scrapy
settings to tune in order to achieve an efficient broad crawl.
5.5.1 Increase concurrency
Concurrency is the number of requests that are processed in parallel. There is a global limit and a per-domain limit.
The default global concurrency limit in Scrapy is not suitable for crawling many different domains in parallel, so you
will want to increase it. How much to increase it will depend on how much CPU you crawler will have available. A
good starting point is 100, but the best way to find out is by doing some trials and identifying at what concurrency
your Scrapy process gets CPU bounded. For optimum performance, you should pick a concurrency where CPU usage
is at 80-90%.
5.5. Broad Crawls 135

To increase the global concurrency use:

CONCURRENT_REQUESTS = 100
5.5.2 Increase Twisted IO thread pool maximum size
Currently Scrapy does DNS resolution in a blocking way with usage of thread pool. With higher concurrency levels
the crawling could be slow or even fail hitting DNS resolver timeouts. Possible solution to increase the number of
threads handling DNS queries. The DNS queue will be processed faster speeding up establishing of connection and
crawling overall.
To increase maximum thread pool size use:
REACTOR_THREADPOOL_MAXSIZE = 20
5.5.3 Setup your own DNS
If you have multiple crawling processes and single central DNS, it can act like DoS attack on the DNS server resulting
to slow down of entire network or even blocking your machines. To avoid this setup your own DNS server with local
cache and upstream to some large DNS like OpenDNS or Verizon.
5.5.4 Reduce log level
When doing broad crawls you are often only interested in the crawl rates you get and any errors found. These stats are
reported by Scrapy when using the INFO log level. In order to save CPU (and log storage requirements) you should
not use DEBUG log level when preforming large broad crawls in production. Using DEBUG level when developing
your (broad) crawler may fine though.
To set the log level use:
LOG_LEVEL = 'INFO'
5.5.5 Disable cookies
Disable cookies unless you really need. Cookies are often not needed when doing broad crawls (search engine crawlers
ignore them), and they improve performance by saving some CPU cycles and reducing the memory footprint of your
Scrapy crawler.
To disable cookies use:
COOKIES_ENABLED = False
5.5.6 Disable retries
Retrying failed HTTP requests can slow down the crawls substantially, specially when sites causes are very slow (or
fail) to respond, thus causing a timeout error which gets retried many times, unnecessarily, preventing crawler capacity
to be reused for other domains.
To disable retries use:
RETRY_ENABLED = False

5.5.7 Reduce download timeout
Unless you are crawling from a very slow connection (which shouldnt be the case for broad crawls) reduce the
download timeout so that stuck requests are discarded quickly and free up capacity to process the next ones.
To reduce the download timeout use:
DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT = 15
5.5.8 Disable redirects
Consider disabling redirects, unless you are interested in following them. When doing broad crawls its common to
save redirects and resolve them when revisiting the site at a later crawl. This also help to keep the number of request
constant per crawl batch, otherwise redirect loops may cause the crawler to dedicate too many resources on any specific
domain.
To disable redirects use:
REDIRECT_ENABLED = False
5.5.9 Enable crawling of Ajax Crawlable Pages
Some pages (up to 1%, based on empirical data from year 2013) declare themselves as ajax crawlable. This means
they provide plain HTML version of content that is usually available only via AJAX. Pages can indicate it in two ways:
1. by using #! in URL - this is the default way;
2. by using a special meta tag - this way is used on main, index website pages.
Scrapy handles (1) automatically; to handle (2) enable AjaxCrawlMiddleware:
AJAXCRAWL_ENABLED = True
When doing broad crawls its common to crawl a lot of index web pages; AjaxCrawlMiddleware helps to crawl
them correctly. It is turned OFF by default because it has some performance overhead, and enabling it for focused
crawls doesnt make much sense.
5.6 Using Firefox for scraping
Here is a list of tips and advice on using Firefox for scraping, along with a list of useful Firefox add-ons to ease the
scraping process.
5.6.1 Caveats with inspecting the live browser DOM
Since Firefox add-ons operate on a live browser DOM, what youll actually see when inspecting the page source is not
the original HTML, but a modified one after applying some browser clean up and executing Javascript code. Firefox,
in particular, is known for adding <tbody> elements to tables. Scrapy, on the other hand, does not modify the original
page HTML, so you wont be able to extract any data if you use <tbody> in your XPath expressions.
Therefore, you should keep in mind the following things when working with Firefox and XPath:
Disable Firefox Javascript while inspecting the DOM looking for XPaths to be used in Scrapy
Never use full XPath paths, use relative and clever ones based on attributes (such as id, class, width, etc)
or any identifying features like contains(@href, image).
5.6. Using Firefox for scraping 137

Never include <tbody> elements in your XPath expressions unless you really know what youre doing
5.6.2 Useful Firefox add-ons for scraping
Firebug
Firebug is a widely known tool among web developers and its also very useful for scraping. In particular, its Inspect
Element feature comes very handy when you need to construct the XPaths for extracting data because it allows you to
view the HTML code of each page element while moving your mouse over it.
See Using Firebug for scraping for a detailed guide on how to use Firebug with Scrapy.
XPather
XPather allows you to test XPath expressions directly on the pages.
XPath Checker
XPath Checker is another Firefox add-on for testing XPaths on your pages.
Tamper Data
Tamper Data is a Firefox add-on which allows you to view and modify the HTTP request headers sent by Firefox.
Firebug also allows to view HTTP headers, but not to modify them.
Firecookie
Firecookie makes it easier to view and manage cookies. You can use this extension to create a new cookie, delete
existing cookies, see a list of cookies for the current site, manage cookies permissions and a lot more.
5.7 Using Firebug for scraping
Note: Google Directory, the example website used in this guide is no longer available as it has been shut down by
Google. The concepts in this guide are still valid though. If you want to update this guide to use a new (working) site,
your contribution will be more than welcome!. See Contributing to Scrapy for information on how to do so.
5.7.1 Introduction
This document explains how to use Firebug (a Firefox add-on) to make the scraping process easier and more fun.
For other useful Firefox add-ons see Useful Firefox add-ons for scraping. There are some caveats with using Firefox
add-ons to inspect pages, see Caveats with inspecting the live browser DOM.
In this example, well show how to use Firebug to scrape data from the Google Directory, which contains the same
data as the Open Directory Project used in the tutorial but with a different face.

Firebug comes with a very useful feature called Inspect Element which allows you to inspect the HTML code of the
different page elements just by hovering your mouse over them. Otherwise you would have to search for the tags
manually through the HTML body which can be a very tedious task.
In the following screenshot you can see the Inspect Element tool in action.
At first sight, we can see that the directory is divided in categories, which are also divided in subcategories.
However, it seems that there are more subcategories than the ones being shown in this page, so well keep looking:
5.7. Using Firebug for scraping 139

As expected, the subcategories contain links to other subcategories, and also links to actual websites, which is the
purpose of the directory.
5.7.2 Getting links to follow
By looking at the category URLs we can see they share a pattern:

http://directory.google.com/Category/Subcategory/Another_Subcategory
Once we know that, we are able to construct a regular expression to follow those links. For example, the following
one:
directory\.google\.com/[A-Z][a-zA-Z_/]+$
So, based on that regular expression we can create the first crawling rule:
Rule(LinkExtractor(allow='directory.google.com/[A-Z][a-zA-Z_/]+$', ),
'parse_category',
follow=True,
),
The Rule object instructs CrawlSpider based spiders how to follow the category links. parse_category will
be a method of the spider which will process and extract data from those pages.
This is how the spider would look so far:
from scrapy.spiders import CrawlSpider, Rule

class GoogleDirectorySpider(CrawlSpider):
name = 'directory.google.com'
allowed_domains = ['directory.google.com']
start_urls = ['http://directory.google.com/']
rules = (
Rule(LinkExtractor(allow='directory\.google\.com/[A-Z][a-zA-Z_/]+$'),
'parse_category', follow=True,
),
)

# write the category page data extraction code here
pass
5.7.3 Extracting the data
Now were going to write the code to extract data from those pages.
With the help of Firebug, well take a look at some page containing links to websites (say
http://directory.google.com/Top/Arts/Awards/) and find out how we can extract those links using Selectors.
Well also use the Scrapy shell to test those XPaths and make sure they work as we expect.
5.7. Using Firebug for scraping 141

As you can see, the page markup is not very descriptive: the elements dont contain id, class or any attribute that
clearly identifies them, so well use the ranking bars as a reference point to select the data to extract when we construct
our XPaths.
After using FireBug, we can see that each link is inside a td tag, which is itself inside a tr tag that also contains the
links ranking bar (in another td).
So we can select the ranking bar, then find its parent (the tr), and then finally, the links td (which contains the data
we want to scrape).
This results in the following XPath:
//td[descendant::a[contains(@href, "#pagerank")]]/following-sibling::td//a
Its important to use the Scrapy shell to test these complex XPath expressions and make sure they work as expected.
Basically, that expression will look for the ranking bars td element, and then select any td element who has a
descendant a element whose href attribute contains the string #pagerank
Of course, this is not the only XPath, and maybe not the simpler one to select that data. Another approach could be,
for example, to find any font tags that have that grey colour of the links,
Finally, we can write our parse_category() method:
# The path to website links in directory page
links = response.xpath('//td[descendant::a[contains(@href, "#pagerank")]]/following-sibling::td/f
for link in links:

item = DirectoryItem()
item['name'] = link.xpath('a/text()').extract()
item['url'] = link.xpath('a/@href').extract()
item['description'] = link.xpath('font[2]/text()').extract()
yield item
Be aware that you may find some elements which appear in Firebug but not in the original HTML, such as the typical
case of <tbody> elements.
or tags which Therefer in page HTML sources may on Firebug inspects the live DOM
5.8 Debugging memory leaks
In Scrapy, objects such as Requests, Responses and Items have a finite lifetime: they are created, used for a while, and
finally destroyed.
From all those objects, the Request is probably the one with the longest lifetime, as it stays waiting in the Scheduler
queue until its time to process it. For more info see Architecture overview.
As these Scrapy objects have a (rather long) lifetime, there is always the risk of accumulating them in memory without
releasing them properly and thus causing what is known as a memory leak.
To help debugging memory leaks, Scrapy provides a built-in mechanism for tracking objects references called trackref ,
and you can also use a third-party library called Guppy for more advanced memory debugging (see below for more
info). Both mechanisms must be used from the Telnet Console.
5.8.1 Common causes of memory leaks
It happens quite often (sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose) that the Scrapy developer passes objects refer-
enced in Requests (for example, using the meta attribute or the request callback function) and that effectively bounds

the lifetime of those referenced objects to the lifetime of the Request. This is, by far, the most common cause of
memory leaks in Scrapy projects, and a quite difficult one to debug for newcomers.
In big projects, the spiders are typically written by different people and some of those spiders could be leaking and
thus affecting the rest of the other (well-written) spiders when they get to run concurrently, which, in turn, affects the
whole crawling process.
The leak could also come from a custom middleware, pipeline or extension that you have written, if you are not
releasing the (previously allocated) resources properly. For example, allocating resources on spider_opened but
not releasing them on spider_closed may cause problems if youre running multiple spiders per process.
Too Many Requests?
By default Scrapy keeps the request queue in memory; it includes Request objects and all objects referenced in
Request attributes (e.g. in meta). While not necessarily a leak, this can take a lot of memory. Enabling persistent job
queue could help keeping memory usage in control.
5.8.2 Debugging memory leaks with trackref
trackref is a module provided by Scrapy to debug the most common cases of memory leaks. It basically tracks the
references to all live Requests, Responses, Item and Selector objects.
You can enter the telnet console and inspect how many objects (of the classes mentioned above) are currently alive
using the prefs() function which is an alias to the print_live_refs() function:
>>> prefs()
Live References
ExampleSpider 1 oldest: 15s ago

HtmlResponse 10 oldest: 1s ago
Selector 2 oldest: 0s ago
FormRequest 878 oldest: 7s ago
As you can see, that report also shows the age of the oldest object in each class. If youre running multiple spiders
per process chances are you can figure out which spider is leaking by looking at the oldest request or response. You
can get the oldest object of each class using the get_oldest() function (from the telnet console).
Which objects are tracked?
The objects tracked by trackrefs are all from these classes (and all its subclasses):
scrapy.http.Request
scrapy.http.Response
scrapy.item.Item
scrapy.selector.Selector
scrapy.spiders.Spider
5.8. Debugging memory leaks 143

A real example
Lets see a concrete example of a hypothetical case of memory leaks. Suppose we have some spider with a line similar
to this one:
return Request("http://www.somenastyspider.com/product.php?pid=%d" % product_id,
callback=self.parse, meta={referer: response})
That line is passing a response reference inside a request which effectively ties the response lifetime to the requests
one, and that would definitely cause memory leaks.
Lets see how we can discover the cause (without knowing it a-priori, of course) by using the trackref tool.
After the crawler is running for a few minutes and we notice its memory usage has grown a lot, we can enter its telnet
console and check the live references:
>>> prefs()
Live References
SomenastySpider 1 oldest: 15s ago

HtmlResponse 3890 oldest: 265s ago
Selector 2 oldest: 0s ago
Request 3878 oldest: 250s ago
The fact that there are so many live responses (and that theyre so old) is definitely suspicious, as responses should
have a relatively short lifetime compared to Requests. The number of responses is similar to the number of requests,
so it looks like they are tied in a some way. We can now go and check the code of the spider to discover the nasty line
that is generating the leaks (passing response references inside requests).
Sometimes extra information about live objects can be helpful. Lets check the oldest response:
>>> from scrapy.utils.trackref import get_oldest
>>> r = get_oldest('HtmlResponse')
>>> r.url
'http://www.somenastyspider.com/product.php?pid=123'
If you want to iterate over all objects, instead of getting the oldest one, you can use the
scrapy.utils.trackref.iter_all() function:
>>> from scrapy.utils.trackref import iter_all
>>> [r.url for r in iter_all('HtmlResponse')]
['http://www.somenastyspider.com/product.php?pid=123',
'http://www.somenastyspider.com/product.php?pid=584',
...
Too many spiders?
If your project has too many spiders executed in parallel, the output of prefs() can be difficult to read. For this
reason, that function has a ignore argument which can be used to ignore a particular class (and all its subclases).
For example, this wont show any live references to spiders:
>>> from scrapy.spiders import Spider
>>> prefs(ignore=Spider)
scrapy.utils.trackref module
Here are the functions available in the trackref module.

class scrapy.utils.trackref.object_ref
Inherit from this class (instead of object) if you want to track live instances with the trackref module.
scrapy.utils.trackref.print_live_refs(class_name, ignore=NoneType)
Print a report of live references, grouped by class name.
Parameters ignore (class or classes tuple) if given, all objects from the specified
class (or tuple of classes) will be ignored.
scrapy.utils.trackref.get_oldest(class_name)
Return the oldest object alive with the given class name, or None if none is found. Use print_live_refs()
first to get a list of all tracked live objects per class name.
scrapy.utils.trackref.iter_all(class_name)
Return an iterator over all objects alive with the given class name, or None if none is found. Use
print_live_refs() first to get a list of all tracked live objects per class name.
5.8.3 Debugging memory leaks with Guppy
trackref provides a very convenient mechanism for tracking down memory leaks, but it only keeps track of the
objects that are more likely to cause memory leaks (Requests, Responses, Items, and Selectors). However, there are
other cases where the memory leaks could come from other (more or less obscure) objects. If this is your case, and
you cant find your leaks using trackref, you still have another resource: the Guppy library.
If you use pip, you can install Guppy with the following command:
pip install guppy
The telnet console also comes with a built-in shortcut (hpy) for accessing Guppy heap objects. Heres an example to
view all Python objects available in the heap using Guppy:
>>> x = hpy.heap()
>>> x.bytype
Partition of a set of 297033 objects. Total size = 52587824 bytes.
Index Count % Size % Cumulative % Type
0 22307 8 16423880 31 16423880 31 dict
1 122285 41 12441544 24 28865424 55 str
2 68346 23 5966696 11 34832120 66 tuple
3 227 0 5836528 11 40668648 77 unicode
4 2461 1 2222272 4 42890920 82 type
5 16870 6 2024400 4 44915320 85 function
6 13949 5 1673880 3 46589200 89 types.CodeType
7 13422 5 1653104 3 48242304 92 list
8 3735 1 1173680 2 49415984 94 _sre.SRE_Pattern
9 1209 0 456936 1 49872920 95 scrapy.http.headers.Headers
<1676 more rows. Type e.g. '_.more' to view.>
You can see that most space is used by dicts. Then, if you want to see from which attribute those dicts are referenced,
you could do:
>>> x.bytype[0].byvia
Partition of a set of 22307 objects. Total size = 16423880 bytes.
Index Count % Size % Cumulative % Referred Via:
0 10982 49 9416336 57 9416336 57 '.__dict__'
1 1820 8 2681504 16 12097840 74 '.__dict__', '.func_globals'
2 3097 14 1122904 7 13220744 80
3 990 4 277200 2 13497944 82 "['cookies']"
4 987 4 276360 2 13774304 84 "['cache']"
5 985 4 275800 2 14050104 86 "['meta']"
5.8. Debugging memory leaks 145

6 897 4 251160 2 14301264 87 '[2]'

7 1 0 196888 1 14498152 88 "['moduleDict']", "['modules']"
8 672 3 188160 1 14686312 89 "['cb_kwargs']"
9 27 0 155016 1 14841328 90 '[1]'
<333 more rows. Type e.g. '_.more' to view.>
As you can see, the Guppy module is very powerful but also requires some deep knowledge about Python internals.
For more info about Guppy, refer to the Guppy documentation.
5.8.4 Leaks without leaks
Sometimes, you may notice that the memory usage of your Scrapy process will only increase, but never decrease.
Unfortunately, this could happen even though neither Scrapy nor your project are leaking memory. This is due to a
(not so well) known problem of Python, which may not return released memory to the operating system in some cases.
For more information on this issue see:
Python Memory Management
Python Memory Management Part 2
Python Memory Management Part 3
The improvements proposed by Evan Jones, which are detailed in this paper, got merged in Python 2.5, but this only
reduces the problem, it doesnt fix it completely. To quote the paper:
Unfortunately, this patch can only free an arena if there are no more objects allocated in it anymore. This
means that fragmentation is a large issue. An application could have many megabytes of free memory,
scattered throughout all the arenas, but it will be unable to free any of it. This is a problem experienced
by all memory allocators. The only way to solve it is to move to a compacting garbage collector, which is
able to move objects in memory. This would require significant changes to the Python interpreter.
To keep memory consumption reasonable you can split the job into several smaller jobs or enable persistent job queue
and stop/start spider from time to time.
5.9 Downloading and processing files and images
Scrapy provides reusable item pipelines for downloading files attached to a particular item (for example, when you
scrape products and also want to download their images locally). These pipelines share a bit of functionality and
structure (we refer to them as media pipelines), but typically youll either use the Files Pipeline or the Images Pipeline.
Both pipelines implement these features:
Avoid re-downloading media that was downloaded recently
Specifying where to store the media (filesystem directory, Amazon S3 bucket)
The Images Pipeline has a few extra functions for processing images:
Convert all downloaded images to a common format (JPG) and mode (RGB)
Thumbnail generation
Check images width/height to make sure they meet a minimum constraint
The pipelines also keep an internal queue of those media URLs which are currently being scheduled for download,
and connect those responses that arrive containing the same media to that queue. This avoids downloading the same
media more than once when its shared by several items.

5.9.1 Using the Files Pipeline
The typical workflow, when using the FilesPipeline goes like this:
1. In a Spider, you scrape an item and put the URLs of the desired into a file_urls field.
2. The item is returned from the spider and goes to the item pipeline.
3. When the item reaches the FilesPipeline, the URLs in the file_urls field are scheduled for download
using the standard Scrapy scheduler and downloader (which means the scheduler and downloader middlewares
are reused), but with a higher priority, processing them before other pages are scraped. The item remains
locked at that particular pipeline stage until the files have finish downloading (or fail for some reason).
4. When the files are downloaded, another field (files) will be populated with the results. This field will contain
a list of dicts with information about the downloaded files, such as the downloaded path, the original scraped url
(taken from the file_urls field) , and the file checksum. The files in the list of the files field will retain
the same order of the original file_urls field. If some file failed downloading, an error will be logged and
the file wont be present in the files field.
5.9.2 Using the Images Pipeline
Using the ImagesPipeline is a lot like using the FilesPipeline, except the default field names used are dif-
ferent: you use image_urls for the image URLs of an item and it will populate an images field for the information
about the downloaded images.
The advantage of using the ImagesPipeline for image files is that you can configure some extra functions like
generating thumbnails and filtering the images based on their size.
The Images Pipeline uses Pillow for thumbnailing and normalizing images to JPEG/RGB format, so you need to install
this library in order to use it. Python Imaging Library (PIL) should also work in most cases, but it is known to cause
troubles in some setups, so we recommend to use Pillow instead of PIL.
5.9.3 Enabling your Media Pipeline
To enable your media pipeline you must first add it to your project ITEM_PIPELINES setting.
For Images Pipeline, use:
ITEM_PIPELINES = {'scrapy.pipelines.images.ImagesPipeline': 1}
For Files Pipeline, use:

ITEM_PIPELINES = {'scrapy.pipelines.files.FilesPipeline': 1}
Note: You can also use both the Files and Images Pipeline at the same time.
Then, configure the target storage setting to a valid value that will be used for storing the downloaded images. Other-
wise the pipeline will remain disabled, even if you include it in the ITEM_PIPELINES setting.
For the Files Pipeline, set the FILES_STORE setting:
FILES_STORE = '/path/to/valid/dir'
For the Images Pipeline, set the IMAGES_STORE setting:

IMAGES_STORE = '/path/to/valid/dir'
5.9. Downloading and processing files and images 147

5.9.4 Supported Storage
File system is currently the only officially supported storage, but there is also support for storing files in Amazon S3.
File system storage
The files are stored using a SHA1 hash of their URLs for the file names.
For example, the following image URL:
http://www.example.com/image.jpg
Whose SHA1 hash is:

3afec3b4765f8f0a07b78f98c07b83f013567a0a
Will be downloaded and stored in the following file:

<IMAGES_STORE>/full/3afec3b4765f8f0a07b78f98c07b83f013567a0a.jpg
Where:
<IMAGES_STORE> is the directory defined in IMAGES_STORE setting for the Images Pipeline.
full is a sub-directory to separate full images from thumbnails (if used). For more info see Thumbnail gener-
ation for images.
Amazon S3 storage
FILES_STORE and IMAGES_STORE can represent an Amazon S3 bucket. Scrapy will automatically upload the
files to the bucket.
For example, this is a valid IMAGES_STORE value:
IMAGES_STORE = 's3://bucket/images'
You can modify the Access Control List (ACL) policy used for the stored files, which is defined by the
FILES_STORE_S3_ACL and IMAGES_STORE_S3_ACL settings. By default, the ACL is set to private. To
make the files publicly available use the public-read policy:
IMAGES_STORE_S3_ACL = 'public-read'
For more information, see canned ACLs in the Amazon S3 Developer Guide.
5.9.5 Usage example
In order to use a media pipeline first, enable it.

Then, if a spider returns a dict with the URLs key (file_urls or image_urls, for the Files or Images Pipeline
respectively), the pipeline will put the results under respective key (files or images).
If you prefer to use Item, then define a custom item with the necessary fields, like in this example for Images Pipeline:
import scrapy
class MyItem(scrapy.Item):
# ... other item fields ...

image_urls = scrapy.Field()
images = scrapy.Field()
If you want to use another field name for the URLs key or for the results key, it is also possible to override it.
For the Files Pipeline, set FILES_URLS_FIELD and/or FILES_RESULT_FIELD settings:
FILES_URLS_FIELD = 'field_name_for_your_files_urls'
FILES_RESULT_FIELD = 'field_name_for_your_processed_files'
For the Images Pipeline, set IMAGES_URLS_FIELD and/or IMAGES_RESULT_FIELD settings:

IMAGES_URLS_FIELD = 'field_name_for_your_images_urls'
IMAGES_RESULT_FIELD = 'field_name_for_your_processed_images'
If you need something more complex and want to override the custom pipeline behaviour, see Extending the Media
Pipelines.
If you have multiple image pipelines inheriting from ImagePipeline and you want to have different settings in
different pipelines you can set setting keys preceded with uppercase name of your pipeline class. E.g. if your
pipeline is called MyPipeline and you want to have custom IMAGES_URLS_FIELD you define setting MYP-
IPELINE_IMAGES_URLS_FIELD and your custom settings will be used.
5.9.6 Additional features
File expiration
The Image Pipeline avoids downloading files that were downloaded recently. To adjust this retention delay use the
FILES_EXPIRES setting (or IMAGES_EXPIRES, in case of Images Pipeline), which specifies the delay in number
of days:
# 120 days of delay for files expiration
FILES_EXPIRES = 120
# 30 days of delay for images expiration

IMAGES_EXPIRES = 30
The default value for both settings is 90 days.

If you have pipeline that subclasses FilesPipeline and youd like to have different setting for it you can set setting keys
preceded by uppercase class name. E.g. given pipeline class called MyPipeline you can set setting key:
MYPIPELINE_FILES_EXPIRES = 180
and pipeline class MyPipeline will have expiration time set to 180.
Thumbnail generation for images
The Images Pipeline can automatically create thumbnails of the downloaded images. In order use this feature,
you must set IMAGES_THUMBS to a dictionary where the keys are the thumbnail names and the values are their
dimensions.
For example:
IMAGES_THUMBS = {
'small': (50, 50),
'big': (270, 270),
}

When you use this feature, the Images Pipeline will create thumbnails of the each specified size with this format:
<IMAGES_STORE>/thumbs/<size_name>/<image_id>.jpg
Where:
<size_name> is the one specified in the IMAGES_THUMBS dictionary keys (small, big, etc)
<image_id> is the SHA1 hash of the image url
Example of image files stored using small and big thumbnail names:
<IMAGES_STORE>/full/63bbfea82b8880ed33cdb762aa11fab722a90a24.jpg
<IMAGES_STORE>/thumbs/small/63bbfea82b8880ed33cdb762aa11fab722a90a24.jpg
<IMAGES_STORE>/thumbs/big/63bbfea82b8880ed33cdb762aa11fab722a90a24.jpg
The first one is the full image, as downloaded from the site.
Filtering out small images
When using the Images Pipeline, you can drop images which are too small, by specifying the minimum allowed size
in the IMAGES_MIN_HEIGHT and IMAGES_MIN_WIDTH settings.
For example:
IMAGES_MIN_HEIGHT = 110
IMAGES_MIN_WIDTH = 110
Note: The size constraints dont affect thumbnail generation at all.
It is possible to set just one size constraint or both. When setting both of them, only images that satisfy both minimum
sizes will be saved. For the above example, images of sizes (105 x 105) or (105 x 200) or (200 x 105) will all be
dropped because at least one dimension is shorter than the constraint.
By default, there are no size constraints, so all images are processed.
5.9.7 Extending the Media Pipelines
See here the methods that you can override in your custom Files Pipeline:
class scrapy.pipelines.files.FilesPipeline
get_media_requests(item, info)
As seen on the workflow, the pipeline will get the URLs of the images to download from the item. In order
to do this, you can override the get_media_requests() method and return a Request for each file
URL:
def get_media_requests(self, item, info):
for file_url in item['file_urls']:
yield scrapy.Request(file_url)
Those requests will be processed by the pipeline and, when they have finished downloading, the results
will be sent to the item_completed() method, as a list of 2-element tuples. Each tuple will contain
(success, file_info_or_error) where:
success is a boolean which is True if the image was downloaded successfully or False if it failed
for some reason

file_info_or_error is a dict containing the following keys (if success is True) or a Twisted
Failure if there was a problem.
url - the url where the file was downloaded from. This is the url of the request returned from the
get_media_requests() method.
path - the path (relative to FILES_STORE) where the file was stored
checksum - a MD5 hash of the image contents
The list of tuples received by item_completed() is guaranteed to retain the same order of the requests
returned from the get_media_requests() method.
Heres a typical value of the results argument:
[(True,
{'checksum': '2b00042f7481c7b056c4b410d28f33cf',
'path': 'full/0a79c461a4062ac383dc4fade7bc09f1384a3910.jpg',
'url': 'http://www.example.com/files/product1.pdf'}),
(False,
Failure(...))]
By default the get_media_requests() method returns None which means there are no files to down-
load for the item.
item_completed(results, item, info)
The FilesPipeline.item_completed() method called when all file requests for a single item
have completed (either finished downloading, or failed for some reason).
The item_completed() method must return the output that will be sent to subsequent item pipeline
stages, so you must return (or drop) the item, as you would in any pipeline.
Here is an example of the item_completed() method where we store the downloaded file paths
(passed in results) in the file_paths item field, and we drop the item if it doesnt contain any files:
def item_completed(self, results, item, info):

file_paths = [x['path'] for ok, x in results if ok]
if not file_paths:
raise DropItem("Item contains no files")
item['file_paths'] = file_paths
return item
By default, the item_completed() method returns the item.

See here the methods that you can override in your custom Images Pipeline:
class scrapy.pipelines.images.ImagesPipeline
The ImagesPipeline is an extension of the FilesPipeline, customizing the field names and
adding custom behavior for images.
get_media_requests(item, info)
Works the same way as FilesPipeline.get_media_requests() method, but using a different
field name for image urls.
Must return a Request for each image URL.
item_completed(results, item, info)
The ImagesPipeline.item_completed() method is called when all image requests for a single
item have completed (either finished downloading, or failed for some reason).

Works the same way as FilesPipeline.item_completed() method, but using a different field
names for storing image downloading results.
By default, the item_completed() method returns the item.
5.9.8 Custom Images pipeline example
Here is a full example of the Images Pipeline whose methods are examplified above:
import scrapy
from scrapy.pipelines.images import ImagesPipeline
class MyImagesPipeline(ImagesPipeline):
def get_media_requests(self, item, info):

for image_url in item['image_urls']:
yield scrapy.Request(image_url)
def item_completed(self, results, item, info):

image_paths = [x['path'] for ok, x in results if ok]
if not image_paths:
raise DropItem("Item contains no images")
item['image_paths'] = image_paths
return item
5.10 Deploying Spiders
This section describes the different options you have for deploying your Scrapy spiders to run them on a regular basis.
Running Scrapy spiders in your local machine is very convenient for the (early) development stage, but not so much
when you need to execute long-running spiders or move spiders to run in production continuously. This is where the
solutions for deploying Scrapy spiders come in.
Popular choices for deploying Scrapy spiders are:
Scrapyd (open source)
Scrapy Cloud (cloud-based)
5.10.1 Deploying to a Scrapyd Server
Scrapyd is an open source application to run Scrapy spiders. It provides a server with HTTP API, capable of running
and monitoring Scrapy spiders.
To deploy spiders to Scrapyd, you can use the scrapyd-deploy tool provided by the scrapyd-client package. Please
refer to the scrapyd-deploy documentation for more information.
Scrapyd is maintained by some of the Scrapy developers.
5.10.2 Deploying to Scrapy Cloud
Scrapy Cloud is a hosted, cloud-based service by Scrapinghub, the company behind Scrapy.
Scrapy Cloud removes the need to setup and monitor servers and provides a nice UI to manage spiders and review
scraped items, logs and stats.

To deploy spiders to Scrapy Cloud you can use the shub command line tool. Please refer to the Scrapy Cloud docu-
mentation for more information.
Scrapy Cloud is compatible with Scrapyd and one can switch between them as needed - the configuration is read from
the scrapy.cfg file just like scrapyd-deploy.
5.11 AutoThrottle extension
This is an extension for automatically throttling crawling speed based on load of both the Scrapy server and the website
you are crawling.
5.11.1 Design goals
1. be nicer to sites instead of using default download delay of zero

2. automatically adjust scrapy to the optimum crawling speed, so the user doesnt have to tune the download delays
to find the optimum one. The user only needs to specify the maximum concurrent requests it allows, and the
extension does the rest.
5.11.2 How it works
AutoThrottle extension adjusts download delays dynamically to make spider send

AUTOTHROTTLE_TARGET_CONCURRENCY concurrent requests on average to each remote website.
It uses download latency to compute the delays. The main idea is the following: if a server needs latency seconds
to respond, a client should send a request each latency/N seconds to have N requests processed in parallel.
Instead of adjusting the delays one can just set a small fixed download delay and impose hard limits on concurrency
using CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_DOMAIN or CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_IP options. It will provide
a similar effect, but there are some important differences:
because the download delay is small there will be occasional bursts of requests;
often non-200 (error) responses can be returned faster than regular responses, so with a small download delay
and a hard concurrency limit crawler will be sending requests to server faster when server starts to return errors.
But this is an opposite of what crawler should do - in case of errors it makes more sense to slow down: these
errors may be caused by the high request rate.
AutoThrottle doesnt have these issues.
5.11.3 Throttling algorithm
AutoThrottle algorithm adjusts download delays based on the following rules:

1. spiders always start with a download delay of AUTOTHROTTLE_START_DELAY;
2. when a response is received, the target download delay is calculated as latency / N where latency is a
latency of the response, and N is AUTOTHROTTLE_TARGET_CONCURRENCY.
3. download delay for next requests is set to the average of previous download delay and the target download delay;
4. latencies of non-200 responses are not allowed to decrease the delay;
5. download delay cant become less than DOWNLOAD_DELAY or greater than AUTOTHROTTLE_MAX_DELAY
5.11. AutoThrottle extension 153

Note: The AutoThrottle extension honours the standard Scrapy settings for concurrency and delay. This means that
it will respect CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_DOMAIN and CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_IP options and
never set a download delay lower than DOWNLOAD_DELAY.
In Scrapy, the download latency is measured as the time elapsed between establishing the TCP connection and receiv-
ing the HTTP headers.
Note that these latencies are very hard to measure accurately in a cooperative multitasking environment because Scrapy
may be busy processing a spider callback, for example, and unable to attend downloads. However, these latencies
should still give a reasonable estimate of how busy Scrapy (and ultimately, the server) is, and this extension builds on
that premise.
5.11.4 Settings
The settings used to control the AutoThrottle extension are:

AUTOTHROTTLE_DEBUG
DOWNLOAD_DELAY
For more information see How it works.
Default: False
Enables the AutoThrottle extension.
Default: 5.0
The initial download delay (in seconds).
Default: 60.0
The maximum download delay (in seconds) to be set in case of high latencies.

AUTOTHROTTLE_TARGET_CONCURRENCY
New in version 1.1.

Default: 1.0
Average number of requests Scrapy should be sending in parallel to remote websites.
By default, AutoThrottle adjusts the delay to send a single concurrent request to each of the remote websites. Set
this option to a higher value (e.g. 2.0) to increase the throughput and the load on remote servers. A lower
AUTOTHROTTLE_TARGET_CONCURRENCY value (e.g. 0.5) makes the crawler more conservative and polite.
Note that CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_DOMAIN and CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_IP options are still
respected when AutoThrottle extension is enabled. This means that if AUTOTHROTTLE_TARGET_CONCURRENCY
is set to a value higher than CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_DOMAIN or CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_IP,
the crawler wont reach this number of concurrent requests.
At every given time point Scrapy can be sending more or less concurrent requests than
AUTOTHROTTLE_TARGET_CONCURRENCY; it is a suggested value the crawler tries to approach, not a hard
limit.
AUTOTHROTTLE_DEBUG
Default: False
Enable AutoThrottle debug mode which will display stats on every response received, so you can see how the throttling
parameters are being adjusted in real time.
5.12 Benchmarking

Scrapy comes with a simple benchmarking suite that spawns a local HTTP server and crawls it at the maximum
possible speed. The goal of this benchmarking is to get an idea of how Scrapy performs in your hardware, in order to
have a common baseline for comparisons. It uses a simple spider that does nothing and just follows links.
To run it use:
scrapy bench
You should see an output like this:

2016-12-16 21:18:48 [scrapy.utils.log] INFO: Scrapy 1.2.2 started (bot: quotesbot)
2016-12-16 21:18:48 [scrapy.utils.log] INFO: Overridden settings: {'CLOSESPIDER_TIMEOUT': 10, 'ROBOTS
2016-12-16 21:18:49 [scrapy.middleware] INFO: Enabled extensions:
['scrapy.extensions.closespider.CloseSpider',
'scrapy.extensions.logstats.LogStats',
'scrapy.extensions.telnet.TelnetConsole',
'scrapy.extensions.corestats.CoreStats']
2016-12-16 21:18:49 [scrapy.middleware] INFO: Enabled downloader middlewares:
['scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.robotstxt.RobotsTxtMiddleware',
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpauth.HttpAuthMiddleware',
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.downloadtimeout.DownloadTimeoutMiddleware',
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.defaultheaders.DefaultHeadersMiddleware',
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.useragent.UserAgentMiddleware',
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.retry.RetryMiddleware',
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.redirect.MetaRefreshMiddleware',
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpcompression.HttpCompressionMiddleware',
5.12. Benchmarking 155

'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.redirect.RedirectMiddleware',
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.cookies.CookiesMiddleware',
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.stats.DownloaderStats']
2016-12-16 21:18:49 [scrapy.middleware] INFO: Enabled spider middlewares:
['scrapy.spidermiddlewares.httperror.HttpErrorMiddleware',
'scrapy.spidermiddlewares.offsite.OffsiteMiddleware',
'scrapy.spidermiddlewares.referer.RefererMiddleware',
'scrapy.spidermiddlewares.urllength.UrlLengthMiddleware',
'scrapy.spidermiddlewares.depth.DepthMiddleware']
2016-12-16 21:18:49 [scrapy.middleware] INFO: Enabled item pipelines:
[]
2016-12-16 21:18:49 [scrapy.core.engine] INFO: Spider opened
2016-12-16 21:18:49 [scrapy.extensions.logstats] INFO: Crawled 0 pages (at 0 pages/min), scraped 0 it
2016-12-16 21:18:50 [scrapy.extensions.logstats] INFO: Crawled 70 pages (at 4200 pages/min), scraped
2016-12-16 21:18:59 [scrapy.core.engine] INFO: Closing spider (closespider_timeout)
2016-12-16 21:19:00 [scrapy.statscollectors] INFO: Dumping Scrapy stats:
{'downloader/request_bytes': 229995,
'downloader/request_count': 534,
'downloader/request_method_count/GET': 534,
'downloader/response_bytes': 1565504,
'downloader/response_count': 534,
'downloader/response_status_count/200': 534,
'finish_reason': 'closespider_timeout',
'finish_time': datetime.datetime(2016, 12, 16, 16, 19, 0, 647725),
'log_count/INFO': 17,
'request_depth_max': 19,
'response_received_count': 534,
'scheduler/dequeued': 533,
'scheduler/dequeued/memory': 533,
'scheduler/enqueued': 10661,
'scheduler/enqueued/memory': 10661,
'start_time': datetime.datetime(2016, 12, 16, 16, 18, 49, 799869)}
2016-12-16 21:19:00 [scrapy.core.engine] INFO: Spider closed (closespider_timeout)
That tells you that Scrapy is able to crawl about 3000 pages per minute in the hardware where you run it. Note that
this is a very simple spider intended to follow links, any custom spider you write will probably do more stuff which
results in slower crawl rates. How slower depends on how much your spider does and how well its written.
In the future, more cases will be added to the benchmarking suite to cover other common scenarios.
5.13 Jobs: pausing and resuming crawls
Sometimes, for big sites, its 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
5.13.1 Job directory
To enable persistence support you just need to define a job directory through the JOBDIR setting. This directory
will be for storing all required data to keep the state of a single job (ie. a spider run). Its important to note that this
directory must not be shared by different spiders, or even different jobs/runs of the same spider, as its meant to be
used for storing the state of a single job.
5.13.2 How to use it
To start a spider with persistence supported 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
5.13.3 Keeping persistent state between batches
Sometimes youll 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. Theres a built-in extension that takes care of serializ-
ing, storing and loading that attribute from the job directory, when the spider starts and stops.
Heres an example of a callback that uses the spider state (other spider code is omitted for brevity):
# parse item here
self.state['items_count'] = self.state.get('items_count', 0) + 1
5.13.4 Persistence gotchas
There are a few things to keep in mind if you want to be able to use the Scrapy persistence support:
Cookies expiration
Cookies may expire. So, if you dont resume your spider quickly the requests scheduled may no longer work. This
wont be an issue if you spider doesnt rely on cookies.
Request serialization
Requests must be serializable by the pickle module, in order for persistence to work, so you should make sure that
your requests are serializable.
The most common issue here is to use lambda functions on request callbacks that cant be persisted.
So, for example, this wont work:
5.13. Jobs: pausing and resuming crawls 157

def some_callback(self, response):

somearg = 'test'
return scrapy.Request('http://www.example.com', callback=lambda r: self.other_callback(r, somearg
def other_callback(self, response, somearg):

print "the argument passed is:", somearg
But this will:

def some_callback(self, response):
somearg = 'test'
return scrapy.Request('http://www.example.com', callback=self.other_callback, meta={'somearg': so
def other_callback(self, response):

somearg = response.meta['somearg']
print "the argument passed is:", somearg
If you wish to log the requests that couldnt be serialized, you can set the SCHEDULER_DEBUG setting to True in
the projects settings page. It is False by default.
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.

CHAPTER 6
Extending Scrapy
6.1 Architecture overview
This document describes the architecture of Scrapy and how its components interact.
6.1.1 Overview
The following diagram shows an overview of the Scrapy architecture with its components and an outline of the data
flow that takes place inside the system (shown by the red arrows). A brief description of the components is included
below with links for more detailed information about them. The data flow is also described below.
159
6.1.2 Data flow
The data flow in Scrapy is controlled by the execution engine, and goes like this:
1. The Engine gets the initial Requests to crawl from the Spider.
2. The Engine schedules the Requests in the Scheduler and asks for the next Requests to crawl.
3. The Scheduler returns the next Requests to the Engine.
4. The Engine sends the Requests to the Downloader, passing through the Downloader Middlewares (see
process_request()).
5. Once the page finishes downloading the Downloader generates a Response (with that page) and sends it to the
Engine, passing through the Downloader Middlewares (see process_response()).
6. The Engine receives the Response from the Downloader and sends it to the Spider for processing, passing
through the Spider Middleware (see process_spider_input()).
7. The Spider processes the Response and returns scraped items and new Requests (to follow) to the Engine,
passing through the Spider Middleware (see process_spider_output()).
8. The Engine sends processed items to Item Pipelines, then send processed Requests to the Scheduler and asks
for possible next Requests to crawl.
9. The process repeats (from step 1) until there are no more requests from the Scheduler.
160 Chapter 6. Extending Scrapy

6.1.3 Components
Scrapy Engine
The engine is responsible for controlling the data flow between all components of the system, and triggering events
when certain actions occur. See the Data Flow section above for more details.
Scheduler
The Scheduler receives requests from the engine and enqueues them for feeding them later (also to the engine) when
the engine requests them.
Downloader
The Downloader is responsible for fetching web pages and feeding them to the engine which, in turn, feeds them to
the spiders.
Spiders
Spiders are custom classes written by Scrapy users to parse responses and extract items (aka scraped items) from them
or additional requests to follow. For more information see Spiders.
Item Pipeline
The Item Pipeline is responsible for processing the items once they have been extracted (or scraped) by the spiders.
Typical tasks include cleansing, validation and persistence (like storing the item in a database). For more information
see Item Pipeline.
Downloader middlewares
Downloader middlewares are specific hooks that sit between the Engine and the Downloader and process requests
when they pass from the Engine to the Downloader, and responses that pass from Downloader to the Engine.
Use a Downloader middleware if you need to do one of the following:
process a request just before it is sent to the Downloader (i.e. right before Scrapy sends the request to the
website);
change received response before passing it to a spider;
send a new Request instead of passing received response to a spider;
pass response to a spider without fetching a web page;
silently drop some requests.
For more information see Downloader Middleware.
6.1. Architecture overview 161

Spider middlewares
Spider middlewares are specific hooks that sit between the Engine and the Spiders and are able to process spider input
(responses) and output (items and requests).
Use a Spider middleware if you need to
post-process output of spider callbacks - change/add/remove requests or items;
post-process start_requests;
handle spider exceptions;
call errback instead of callback for some of the requests based on response content.
For more information see Spider Middleware.
6.1.4 Event-driven networking
Scrapy is written with Twisted, a popular event-driven networking framework for Python. Thus, its implemented
using a non-blocking (aka asynchronous) code for concurrency.
For more information about asynchronous programming and Twisted see these links:
Introduction to Deferreds in Twisted
Twisted - hello, asynchronous programming
Twisted Introduction - Krondo
6.2 Downloader Middleware
The downloader middleware is a framework of hooks into Scrapys request/response processing. Its a light, low-level
system for globally altering Scrapys requests and responses.
6.2.1 Activating a downloader middleware
To activate a downloader middleware component, add it to the DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES setting, which is a

dict whose keys are the middleware class paths and their values are the middleware orders.
Heres an example:
DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES = {
'myproject.middlewares.CustomDownloaderMiddleware': 543,
}
The DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES setting is merged with the DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES_BASE setting de-

fined in Scrapy (and not meant to be overridden) and then sorted by order to get the final sorted list of enabled
middlewares: the first middleware is the one closer to the engine and the last is the one closer to the downloader. In
other words, the process_request() method of each middleware will be invoked in increasing middleware order
(100, 200, 300, ...) and the process_response() method of each middleware will be invoked in decreasing order.
To decide which order to assign to your middleware see the DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES_BASE setting and pick a
value according to where you want to insert the middleware. The order does matter because each middleware performs
a different action and your middleware could depend on some previous (or subsequent) middleware being applied.

If you want to disable a built-in middleware (the ones defined in DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES_BASE and enabled
by default) you must define it in your projects DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES setting and assign None as its value.
For example, if you want to disable the user-agent middleware:
DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES = {
'myproject.middlewares.CustomDownloaderMiddleware': 543,
'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.useragent.UserAgentMiddleware': None,
}
Finally, keep in mind that some middlewares may need to be enabled through a particular setting. See each middleware
documentation for more info.
6.2.2 Writing your own downloader middleware
Each middleware component is a Python class that defines one or more of the following methods:
class scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.DownloaderMiddleware
Note: Any of the downloader middleware methods may also return a deferred.
process_request(request, spider)
This method is called for each request that goes through the download middleware.
process_request() should either: return None, return a Response object, return a Request
object, or raise IgnoreRequest.
If it returns None, Scrapy will continue processing this request, executing all other middlewares until,
finally, the appropriate downloader handler is called the request performed (and its response downloaded).
If it returns a Response object, Scrapy wont bother calling any other process_request() or
process_exception() methods, or the appropriate download function; itll return that response.
The process_response() methods of installed middleware is always called on every response.
If it returns a Request object, Scrapy will stop calling process_request methods and reschedule the
returned request. Once the newly returned request is performed, the appropriate middleware chain will be
called on the downloaded response.
If it raises an IgnoreRequest exception, the process_exception() methods of installed down-
loader middleware will be called. If none of them handle the exception, the errback function of the request
(Request.errback) is called. If no code handles the raised exception, it is ignored and not logged
(unlike other exceptions).
Parameters
request (Request object) the request being processed
spider (Spider object) the spider for which this request is intended
process_response(request, response, spider)
process_response() should either: return a Response object, return a Request object or raise a
IgnoreRequest exception.
If it returns a Response (it could be the same given response, or a brand-new one), that response will
continue to be processed with the process_response() of the next middleware in the chain.
If it returns a Request object, the middleware chain is halted and the returned request is resched-
uled to be downloaded in the future. This is the same behavior as if a request is returned from
process_request().
6.2. Downloader Middleware 163

If it raises an IgnoreRequest exception, the errback function of the request (Request.errback) is

called. If no code handles the raised exception, it is ignored and not logged (unlike other exceptions).
Parameters
request (is a Request object) the request that originated the response
response (Response object) the response being processed
spider (Spider object) the spider for which this response is intended
process_exception(request, exception, spider)
Scrapy calls process_exception() when a download handler or a process_request() (from a
downloader middleware) raises an exception (including an IgnoreRequest exception)
process_exception() should return: either None, a Response object, or a Request object.
If it returns None, Scrapy will continue processing this exception, executing any other
process_exception() methods of installed middleware, until no middleware is left and the default
exception handling kicks in.
If it returns a Response object, the process_response() method chain of installed middleware is
started, and Scrapy wont bother calling any other process_exception() methods of middleware.
If it returns a Request object, the returned request is rescheduled to be downloaded in the future. This
stops the execution of process_exception() methods of the middleware the same as returning a
response would.
Parameters
request (is a Request object) the request that generated the exception
exception (an Exception object) the raised exception
spider (Spider object) the spider for which this request is intended
6.2.3 Built-in downloader middleware reference
This page describes all downloader middleware components that come with Scrapy. For information on how to use
them and how to write your own downloader middleware, see the downloader middleware usage guide.
For a list of the components enabled by default (and their orders) see the DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES_BASE
setting.
CookiesMiddleware
class scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.cookies.CookiesMiddleware
This middleware enables working with sites that require cookies, such as those that use sessions. It keeps track
of cookies sent by web servers, and send them back on subsequent requests (from that spider), just like web
browsers do.
The following settings can be used to configure the cookie middleware:
COOKIES_ENABLED
COOKIES_DEBUG

Multiple cookie sessions per spider

There is support for keeping multiple cookie sessions per spider by using the cookiejar Request meta key. By
default it uses a single cookie jar (session), but you can pass an identifier to use different ones.
For example:
for i, url in enumerate(urls):
yield scrapy.Request(url, meta={'cookiejar': i},
callback=self.parse_page)
Keep in mind that the cookiejar meta key is not sticky. You need to keep passing it along on subsequent requests.
For example:
def parse_page(self, response):
# do some processing
return scrapy.Request("http://www.example.com/otherpage",
meta={'cookiejar': response.meta['cookiejar']},
callback=self.parse_other_page)
COOKIES_ENABLED
Default: True
Whether to enable the cookies middleware. If disabled, no cookies will be sent to web servers.
COOKIES_DEBUG
Default: False
If enabled, Scrapy will log all cookies sent in requests (ie. Cookie header) and all cookies received in responses (ie.
Set-Cookie header).
Heres an example of a log with COOKIES_DEBUG enabled:
2011-04-06 14:35:10-0300 [scrapy.core.engine] INFO: Spider opened
2011-04-06 14:35:10-0300 [scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.cookies] DEBUG: Sending cookies to: <GET http:
Cookie: clientlanguage_nl=en_EN
2011-04-06 14:35:14-0300 [scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.cookies] DEBUG: Received cookies from: <200 ht
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=B~FA4DC0C496C8762AE4F1A620EAB34F38; Path=/
Set-Cookie: ip_isocode=US
Set-Cookie: clientlanguage_nl=en_EN; Expires=Thu, 07-Apr-2011 21:21:34 GMT; Path=/
2011-04-06 14:49:50-0300 [scrapy.core.engine] DEBUG: Crawled (200) <GET http://www.diningcity.com/net
[...]
DefaultHeadersMiddleware
class scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.defaultheaders.DefaultHeadersMiddleware
This middleware sets all default requests headers specified in the DEFAULT_REQUEST_HEADERS setting.

DownloadTimeoutMiddleware
class scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.downloadtimeout.DownloadTimeoutMiddleware
This middleware sets the download timeout for requests specified in the DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT setting or
download_timeout spider attribute.
Note: You can also set download timeout per-request using download_timeout Request.meta key; this is sup-
ported even when DownloadTimeoutMiddleware is disabled.
HttpAuthMiddleware
class scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpauth.HttpAuthMiddleware
This middleware authenticates all requests generated from certain spiders using Basic access authentication
(aka. HTTP auth).
To enable HTTP authentication from certain spiders, set the http_user and http_pass attributes of those
spiders.
Example:
from scrapy.spiders import CrawlSpider
class SomeIntranetSiteSpider(CrawlSpider):
http_user = 'someuser'
http_pass = 'somepass'
name = 'intranet.example.com'
# .. rest of the spider code omitted ...
HttpCacheMiddleware
class scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpcache.HttpCacheMiddleware
This middleware provides low-level cache to all HTTP requests and responses. It has to be combined with a
cache storage backend as well as a cache policy.
Scrapy ships with three HTTP cache storage backends:
Filesystem storage backend (default)
DBM storage backend
LevelDB storage backend
You can change the HTTP cache storage backend with the HTTPCACHE_STORAGE setting. Or you can also
implement your own storage backend.
Scrapy ships with two HTTP cache policies:
RFC2616 policy
Dummy policy (default)
You can change the HTTP cache policy with the HTTPCACHE_POLICY setting. Or you can also implement
your own policy. You can also avoid caching a response on every policy using dont_cache meta key equals
True.

Dummy policy (default)
This policy has no awareness of any HTTP Cache-Control directives. Every request and its corresponding response are
cached. When the same request is seen again, the response is returned without transferring anything from the Internet.
The Dummy policy is useful for testing spiders faster (without having to wait for downloads every time) and for trying
your spider offline, when an Internet connection is not available. The goal is to be able to replay a spider run exactly
as it ran before.
In order to use this policy, set:
HTTPCACHE_POLICY to scrapy.extensions.httpcache.DummyPolicy
RFC2616 policy
This policy provides a RFC2616 compliant HTTP cache, i.e. with HTTP Cache-Control awareness, aimed at produc-
tion and used in continuous runs to avoid downloading unmodified data (to save bandwidth and speed up crawls).
what is implemented:
Do not attempt to store responses/requests with no-store cache-control directive set
Do not serve responses from cache if no-cache cache-control directive is set even for fresh responses
Compute freshness lifetime from max-age cache-control directive
Compute freshness lifetime from Expires response header
Compute freshness lifetime from Last-Modified response header (heuristic used by Firefox)
Compute current age from Age response header
Compute current age from Date header
Revalidate stale responses based on Last-Modified response header
Revalidate stale responses based on ETag response header
Set Date header for any received response missing it
Support max-stale cache-control directive in requests
This allows spiders to be configured with the full RFC2616 cache policy, but avoid revalidation on a request-by-
request basis, while remaining conformant with the HTTP spec.
Example:
Add Cache-Control: max-stale=600 to Request headers to accept responses that have exceeded their expiration
time by no more than 600 seconds.
See also: RFC2616, 14.9.3
what is missing:
Pragma: no-cache support https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.9.1
Vary header support https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html#sec13.6
Invalidation after updates or deletes https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html#sec13.10
... probably others ..
In order to use this policy, set:
HTTPCACHE_POLICY to scrapy.extensions.httpcache.RFC2616Policy

Filesystem storage backend (default)
File system storage backend is available for the HTTP cache middleware.
In order to use this storage backend, set:
HTTPCACHE_STORAGE to scrapy.extensions.httpcache.FilesystemCacheStorage
Each request/response pair is stored in a different directory containing the following files:
request_body - the plain request body
request_headers - the request headers (in raw HTTP format)
response_body - the plain response body
response_headers - the request headers (in raw HTTP format)
meta - some metadata of this cache resource in Python repr() format (grep-friendly format)
pickled_meta - the same metadata in meta but pickled for more efficient deserialization
The directory name is made from the request fingerprint (see scrapy.utils.request.fingerprint), and
one level of subdirectories is used to avoid creating too many files into the same directory (which is inefficient in many
file systems). An example directory could be:
/path/to/cache/dir/example.com/72/72811f648e718090f041317756c03adb0ada46c7
DBM storage backend

A DBM storage backend is also available for the HTTP cache middleware.
By default, it uses the anydbm module, but you can change it with the HTTPCACHE_DBM_MODULE setting.
In order to use this storage backend, set:
HTTPCACHE_STORAGE to scrapy.extensions.httpcache.DbmCacheStorage
LevelDB storage backend

A LevelDB storage backend is also available for the HTTP cache middleware.
This backend is not recommended for development because only one process can access LevelDB databases at the
same time, so you cant run a crawl and open the scrapy shell in parallel for the same spider.
In order to use this storage backend:
set HTTPCACHE_STORAGE to scrapy.extensions.httpcache.LeveldbCacheStorage
install LevelDB python bindings like pip install leveldb
HTTPCache middleware settings
The HttpCacheMiddleware can be configured through the following settings:

HTTPCACHE_ENABLED New in version 0.11.

Default: False
Whether the HTTP cache will be enabled.
Changed in version 0.11: Before 0.11, HTTPCACHE_DIR was used to enable cache.
HTTPCACHE_EXPIRATION_SECS Default: 0
Expiration time for cached requests, in seconds.
Cached requests older than this time will be re-downloaded. If zero, cached requests will never expire.
Changed in version 0.11: Before 0.11, zero meant cached requests always expire.
HTTPCACHE_DIR Default: httpcache

The directory to use for storing the (low-level) HTTP cache. If empty, the HTTP cache will be disabled. If a relative
path is given, is taken relative to the project data dir. For more info see: Default structure of Scrapy projects.
HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_HTTP_CODES New in version 0.10.

Default: []
Dont cache response with these HTTP codes.
HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_MISSING Default: False

If enabled, requests not found in the cache will be ignored instead of downloaded.
HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_SCHEMES New in version 0.10.

Default: [file]
Dont cache responses with these URI schemes.
HTTPCACHE_STORAGE Default: scrapy.extensions.httpcache.FilesystemCacheStorage

The class which implements the cache storage backend.
HTTPCACHE_DBM_MODULE New in version 0.13.

Default: anydbm
The database module to use in the DBM storage backend. This setting is specific to the DBM backend.
HTTPCACHE_POLICY New in version 0.18.

Default: scrapy.extensions.httpcache.DummyPolicy
The class which implements the cache policy.
HTTPCACHE_GZIP New in version 1.0.

Default: False
If enabled, will compress all cached data with gzip. This setting is specific to the Filesystem backend.

HTTPCACHE_ALWAYS_STORE New in version 1.1.

Default: False
If enabled, will cache pages unconditionally.
A spider may wish to have all responses available in the cache, for future use with Cache-Control: max-stale, for
instance. The DummyPolicy caches all responses but never revalidates them, and sometimes a more nuanced policy is
desirable.
This setting still respects Cache-Control: no-store directives in responses. If you dont want that, filter no-store out of
the Cache-Control headers in responses you feedto the cache middleware.
HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_RESPONSE_CACHE_CONTROLS New in version 1.1.

Default: []
List of Cache-Control directives in responses to be ignored.
Sites often set no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, etc., but get upset at the traffic a spider can generate if it
respects those directives. This allows to selectively ignore Cache-Control directives that are known to be unimportant
for the sites being crawled.
We assume that the spider will not issue Cache-Control directives in requests unless it actually needs them, so directives
in requests are not filtered.
HttpCompressionMiddleware
class scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpcompression.HttpCompressionMiddleware
This middleware allows compressed (gzip, deflate) traffic to be sent/received from web sites.
HttpCompressionMiddleware Settings
COMPRESSION_ENABLED Default: True

Whether the Compression middleware will be enabled.
HttpProxyMiddleware
New in version 0.8.

class scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpproxy.HttpProxyMiddleware
This middleware sets the HTTP proxy to use for requests, by setting the proxy meta value for Request
objects.
Like the Python standard library modules urllib and urllib2, it obeys the following environment variables:
http_proxy
https_proxy
no_proxy
You can also set the meta key proxy per-request, to a value like http://some_proxy_server:port.

RedirectMiddleware
class scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.redirect.RedirectMiddleware
This middleware handles redirection of requests based on response status.
The urls which the request goes through (while being redirected) can be found in the redirect_urls
Request.meta key.
The RedirectMiddleware can be configured through the following settings (see the settings documentation for
more info):
REDIRECT_ENABLED
REDIRECT_MAX_TIMES
If Request.meta has dont_redirect key set to True, the request will be ignored by this middleware.
If you want to handle some redirect status codes in your spider, you can specify these in the
handle_httpstatus_list spider attribute.
For example, if you want the redirect middleware to ignore 301 and 302 responses (and pass them through to your
spider) you can do this:
handle_httpstatus_list = [301, 302]
The handle_httpstatus_list key of Request.meta can also be used to specify which response codes to
allow on a per-request basis. You can also set the meta key handle_httpstatus_all to True if you want to
allow any response code for a request.
RedirectMiddleware settings
REDIRECT_ENABLED New in version 0.13.

Default: True
Whether the Redirect middleware will be enabled.
REDIRECT_MAX_TIMES Default: 20
The maximum number of redirections that will be followed for a single request.
MetaRefreshMiddleware
class scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.redirect.MetaRefreshMiddleware
This middleware handles redirection of requests based on meta-refresh html tag.
The MetaRefreshMiddleware can be configured through the following settings (see the settings documentation
for more info):
METAREFRESH_ENABLED
METAREFRESH_MAXDELAY
This middleware obey REDIRECT_MAX_TIMES setting, dont_redirect and redirect_urls request meta
keys as described for RedirectMiddleware

MetaRefreshMiddleware settings
METAREFRESH_ENABLED New in version 0.17.

Default: True
Whether the Meta Refresh middleware will be enabled.
METAREFRESH_MAXDELAY Default: 100

The maximum meta-refresh delay (in seconds) to follow the redirection. Some sites use meta-refresh for redirecting
to a session expired page, so we restrict automatic redirection to the maximum delay.
RetryMiddleware
class scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.retry.RetryMiddleware
A middleware to retry failed requests that are potentially caused by temporary problems such as a connection
timeout or HTTP 500 error.
Failed pages are collected on the scraping process and rescheduled at the end, once the spider has finished crawl-
ing all regular (non failed) pages. Once there are no more failed pages to retry, this middleware sends a signal
(retry_complete), so other extensions could connect to that signal.
The RetryMiddleware can be configured through the following settings (see the settings documentation for more
info):
RETRY_ENABLED
RETRY_TIMES
RETRY_HTTP_CODES
If Request.meta has dont_retry key set to True, the request will be ignored by this middleware.
RetryMiddleware Settings
RETRY_ENABLED New in version 0.13.

Default: True
Whether the Retry middleware will be enabled.
RETRY_TIMES Default: 2
Maximum number of times to retry, in addition to the first download.
RETRY_HTTP_CODES Default: [500, 502, 503, 504, 408]

Which HTTP response codes to retry. Other errors (DNS lookup issues, connections lost, etc) are always retried.
In some cases you may want to add 400 to RETRY_HTTP_CODES because it is a common code used to indicate
server overload. It is not included by default because HTTP specs say so.

RobotsTxtMiddleware
class scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.robotstxt.RobotsTxtMiddleware
This middleware filters out requests forbidden by the robots.txt exclusion standard.
To make sure Scrapy respects robots.txt make sure the middleware is enabled and the ROBOTSTXT_OBEY
setting is enabled.
If Request.meta has dont_obey_robotstxt key set to True the request will be ignored by this middleware
even if ROBOTSTXT_OBEY is enabled.
DownloaderStats
class scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.stats.DownloaderStats
Middleware that stores stats of all requests, responses and exceptions that pass through it.
To use this middleware you must enable the DOWNLOADER_STATS setting.
UserAgentMiddleware
class scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.useragent.UserAgentMiddleware
Middleware that allows spiders to override the default user agent.
In order for a spider to override the default user agent, its user_agent attribute must be set.
AjaxCrawlMiddleware
class scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.ajaxcrawl.AjaxCrawlMiddleware
Middleware that finds AJAX crawlable page variants based on meta-fragment html tag. See
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started for more info.
Note: Scrapy finds AJAX crawlable pages for URLs like http://example.com/!#foo=bar even
without this middleware. AjaxCrawlMiddleware is necessary when URL doesnt contain !#. This is often a
case for index or main website pages.
AjaxCrawlMiddleware Settings
AJAXCRAWL_ENABLED New in version 0.21.

Default: False
Whether the AjaxCrawlMiddleware will be enabled. You may want to enable it for broad crawls.
HttpProxyMiddleware settings
HTTPPROXY_AUTH_ENCODING Default: "latin-1"

The default encoding for proxy authentication on HttpProxyMiddleware.

6.3 Spider Middleware
The spider middleware is a framework of hooks into Scrapys spider processing mechanism where you can plug custom
functionality to process the responses that are sent to Spiders for processing and to process the requests and items that
are generated from spiders.
6.3.1 Activating a spider middleware
To activate a spider middleware component, add it to the SPIDER_MIDDLEWARES setting, which is a dict whose
keys are the middleware class path and their values are the middleware orders.
Heres an example:
SPIDER_MIDDLEWARES = {
'myproject.middlewares.CustomSpiderMiddleware': 543,
}
The SPIDER_MIDDLEWARES setting is merged with the SPIDER_MIDDLEWARES_BASE setting defined in Scrapy
(and not meant to be overridden) and then sorted by order to get the final sorted list of enabled middlewares: the
first middleware is the one closer to the engine and the last is the one closer to the spider. In other words, the
process_spider_input() method of each middleware will be invoked in increasing middleware order (100,
200, 300, ...), and the process_spider_output() method of each middleware will be invoked in decreasing
order.
To decide which order to assign to your middleware see the SPIDER_MIDDLEWARES_BASE setting and pick a value
according to where you want to insert the middleware. The order does matter because each middleware performs a
different action and your middleware could depend on some previous (or subsequent) middleware being applied.
If you want to disable a builtin middleware (the ones defined in SPIDER_MIDDLEWARES_BASE, and enabled by de-
fault) you must define it in your project SPIDER_MIDDLEWARES setting and assign None as its value. For example,
if you want to disable the off-site middleware:
SPIDER_MIDDLEWARES = {
'myproject.middlewares.CustomSpiderMiddleware': 543,
'scrapy.spidermiddlewares.offsite.OffsiteMiddleware': None,
}
Finally, keep in mind that some middlewares may need to be enabled through a particular setting. See each middleware
6.3.2 Writing your own spider middleware
Each middleware component is a Python class that defines one or more of the following methods:
class scrapy.spidermiddlewares.SpiderMiddleware
process_spider_input(response, spider)
This method is called for each response that goes through the spider middleware and into the spider, for
processing.
process_spider_input() should return None or raise an exception.
If it returns None, Scrapy will continue processing this response, executing all other middlewares until,
finally, the response is handed to the spider for processing.

If it raises an exception, Scrapy wont bother calling any other spider middleware
process_spider_input() and will call the request errback. The output of the errback
is chained back in the other direction for process_spider_output() to process it, or
process_spider_exception() if it raised an exception.
Parameters
response (Response object) the response being processed
spider (Spider object) the spider for which this response is intended
process_spider_output(response, result, spider)
This method is called with the results returned from the Spider, after it has processed the response.
process_spider_output() must return an iterable of Request, dict or Item objects.
Parameters
response (Response object) the response which generated this output from the spi-
der
result (an iterable of Request, dict or Item objects) the result returned by the
spider
spider (Spider object) the spider whose result is being processed
process_spider_exception(response, exception, spider)
This method is called when a spider or process_spider_input() method (from other spider mid-
dleware) raises an exception.
process_spider_exception() should return either None or an iterable of Response, dict or
Item objects.
If it returns None, Scrapy will continue processing this exception, executing any other
process_spider_exception() in the following middleware components, until no middleware
components are left and the exception reaches the engine (where its logged and discarded).
If it returns an iterable the process_spider_output() pipeline kicks in, and no other
process_spider_exception() will be called.
Parameters
response (Response object) the response being processed when the exception was
raised
exception (Exception object) the exception raised
spider (Spider object) the spider which raised the exception
process_start_requests(start_requests, spider)
This method is called with the start requests of the spider, and works similarly to the
process_spider_output() method, except that it doesnt have a response associated and must
return only requests (not items).
It receives an iterable (in the start_requests parameter) and must return another iterable of
Request objects.
Note: When implementing this method in your spider middleware, you should always return an iterable
(that follows the input one) and not consume all start_requests iterator because it can be very large
(or even unbounded) and cause a memory overflow. The Scrapy engine is designed to pull start requests
6.3. Spider Middleware 175

while it has capacity to process them, so the start requests iterator can be effectively endless where there
is some other condition for stopping the spider (like a time limit or item/page count).
Parameters
start_requests (an iterable of Request) the start requests
spider (Spider object) the spider to whom the start requests belong
6.3.3 Built-in spider middleware reference
This page describes all spider middleware components that come with Scrapy. For information on how to use them
and how to write your own spider middleware, see the spider middleware usage guide.
For a list of the components enabled by default (and their orders) see the SPIDER_MIDDLEWARES_BASE setting.
DepthMiddleware
class scrapy.spidermiddlewares.depth.DepthMiddleware
DepthMiddleware is a scrape middleware used for tracking the depth of each Request inside the site being
scraped. It can be used to limit the maximum depth to scrape or things like that.
The DepthMiddleware can be configured through the following settings (see the settings documentation for
more info):
DEPTH_LIMIT - The maximum depth that will be allowed to crawl for any site. If zero, no limit will be
imposed.
DEPTH_STATS - Whether to collect depth stats.
DEPTH_PRIORITY - Whether to prioritize the requests based on their depth.
HttpErrorMiddleware
class scrapy.spidermiddlewares.httperror.HttpErrorMiddleware
Filter out unsuccessful (erroneous) HTTP responses so that spiders dont have to deal with them, which (most
of the time) imposes an overhead, consumes more resources, and makes the spider logic more complex.
According to the HTTP standard, successful responses are those whose status codes are in the 200-300 range.
If you still want to process response codes outside that range, you can specify which response codes the spider is able
to handle using the handle_httpstatus_list spider attribute or HTTPERROR_ALLOWED_CODES setting.
For example, if you want your spider to handle 404 responses you can do this:
handle_httpstatus_list = [404]
The handle_httpstatus_list key of Request.meta can also be used to specify which response codes to
allow on a per-request basis. You can also set the meta key handle_httpstatus_all to True if you want to
allow any response code for a request.
Keep in mind, however, that its usually a bad idea to handle non-200 responses, unless you really know what youre
doing.
For more information see: HTTP Status Code Definitions.

HttpErrorMiddleware settings
HTTPERROR_ALLOWED_CODES Default: []
Pass all responses with non-200 status codes contained in this list.
HTTPERROR_ALLOW_ALL Default: False

Pass all responses, regardless of its status code.
OffsiteMiddleware
class scrapy.spidermiddlewares.offsite.OffsiteMiddleware
Filters out Requests for URLs outside the domains covered by the spider.
This middleware filters out every request whose host names arent in the spiders allowed_domains at-
tribute. All subdomains of any domain in the list are also allowed. E.g. the rule www.example.org will also
allow bob.www.example.org but not www2.example.com nor example.com.
When your spider returns a request for a domain not belonging to those covered by the spider, this middleware
will log a debug message similar to this one:
DEBUG: Filtered offsite request to 'www.othersite.com': <GET http://www.othersite.com/some/page.
To avoid filling the log with too much noise, it will only print one of these messages for each new domain
filtered. So, for example, if another request for www.othersite.com is filtered, no log message will be
printed. But if a request for someothersite.com is filtered, a message will be printed (but only for the first
request filtered).
If the spider doesnt define an allowed_domains attribute, or the attribute is empty, the offsite middleware
will allow all requests.
If the request has the dont_filter attribute set, the offsite middleware will allow the request even if its
domain is not listed in allowed domains.
RefererMiddleware
class scrapy.spidermiddlewares.referer.RefererMiddleware
Populates Request Referer header, based on the URL of the Response which generated it.
RefererMiddleware settings
REFERER_ENABLED New in version 0.15.

Default: True
Whether to enable referer middleware.
UrlLengthMiddleware
class scrapy.spidermiddlewares.urllength.UrlLengthMiddleware
Filters out requests with URLs longer than URLLENGTH_LIMIT
The UrlLengthMiddleware can be configured through the following settings (see the settings documenta-
tion for more info):
6.3. Spider Middleware 177

URLLENGTH_LIMIT - The maximum URL length to allow for crawled URLs.
6.4 Extensions
The extensions framework provides a mechanism for inserting your own custom functionality into Scrapy.
Extensions are just regular classes that are instantiated at Scrapy startup, when extensions are initialized.
6.4.1 Extension settings
Extensions use the Scrapy settings to manage their settings, just like any other Scrapy code.
It is customary for extensions to prefix their settings with their own name, to avoid collision with existing (and fu-
ture) extensions. For example, a hypothetic extension to handle Google Sitemaps would use settings like GOOGLE-
SITEMAP_ENABLED, GOOGLESITEMAP_DEPTH, and so on.
6.4.2 Loading & activating extensions
Extensions are loaded and activated at startup by instantiating a single instance of the extension class. Therefore, all
the extension initialization code must be performed in the class constructor (__init__ method).
To make an extension available, add it to the EXTENSIONS setting in your Scrapy settings. In EXTENSIONS, each
extension is represented by a string: the full Python path to the extensions class name. For example:
EXTENSIONS = {
'scrapy.extensions.corestats.CoreStats': 500,
'scrapy.extensions.telnet.TelnetConsole': 500,
}
As you can see, the EXTENSIONS setting is a dict where the keys are the extension paths, and their values are the
orders, which define the extension loading order. The EXTENSIONS setting is merged with the EXTENSIONS_BASE
setting defined in Scrapy (and not meant to be overridden) and then sorted by order to get the final sorted list of enabled
extensions.
As extensions typically do not depend on each other, their loading order is irrelevant in most cases. This is why the
EXTENSIONS_BASE setting defines all extensions with the same order (0). However, this feature can be exploited if
you need to add an extension which depends on other extensions already loaded.
6.4.3 Available, enabled and disabled extensions
Not all available extensions will be enabled. Some of them usually depend on a particular setting. For example, the
HTTP Cache extension is available by default but disabled unless the HTTPCACHE_ENABLED setting is set.
6.4.4 Disabling an extension
In order to disable an extension that comes enabled by default (ie. those included in the EXTENSIONS_BASE setting)
you must set its order to None. For example:
EXTENSIONS = {
'scrapy.extensions.corestats.CoreStats': None,
}

6.4.5 Writing your own extension
Each extension is a Python class. The main entry point for a Scrapy extension (this also includes middlewares and
pipelines) is the from_crawler class method which receives a Crawler instance. Through the Crawler object
you can access settings, signals, stats, and also control the crawling behaviour.
Typically, extensions connect to signals and perform tasks triggered by them.
Finally, if the from_crawler method raises the NotConfigured exception, the extension will be disabled. Oth-
erwise, the extension will be enabled.
Sample extension
Here we will implement a simple extension to illustrate the concepts described in the previous section. This extension
will log a message every time:
a spider is opened
a spider is closed
a specific number of items are scraped
The extension will be enabled through the MYEXT_ENABLED setting and the number of items will be specified through
the MYEXT_ITEMCOUNT setting.
Here is the code of such extension:
import logging
from scrapy import signals
from scrapy.exceptions import NotConfigured
logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)
class SpiderOpenCloseLogging(object):
def __init__(self, item_count):

self.item_count = item_count
self.items_scraped = 0
@classmethod
# first check if the extension should be enabled and raise
# NotConfigured otherwise
if not crawler.settings.getbool('MYEXT_ENABLED'):
raise NotConfigured
# get the number of items from settings

item_count = crawler.settings.getint('MYEXT_ITEMCOUNT', 1000)
# instantiate the extension object

ext = cls(item_count)
# connect the extension object to signals

crawler.signals.connect(ext.spider_opened, signal=signals.spider_opened)
crawler.signals.connect(ext.spider_closed, signal=signals.spider_closed)
crawler.signals.connect(ext.item_scraped, signal=signals.item_scraped)
# return the extension object

return ext
6.4. Extensions 179

def spider_opened(self, spider):

logger.info("opened spider %s", spider.name)
def spider_closed(self, spider):

logger.info("closed spider %s", spider.name)
def item_scraped(self, item, spider):

self.items_scraped += 1
if self.items_scraped % self.item_count == 0:
logger.info("scraped %d items", self.items_scraped)
6.4.6 Built-in extensions reference
General purpose extensions
Log Stats extension
class scrapy.extensions.logstats.LogStats
Log basic stats like crawled pages and scraped items.
Core Stats extension
class scrapy.extensions.corestats.CoreStats
Enable the collection of core statistics, provided the stats collection is enabled (see Stats Collection).
Telnet console extension
class scrapy.extensions.telnet.TelnetConsole
Provides a telnet console for getting into a Python interpreter inside the currently running Scrapy process, which can
be very useful for debugging.
The telnet console must be enabled by the TELNETCONSOLE_ENABLED setting, and the server will listen in the port
specified in TELNETCONSOLE_PORT.
Memory usage extension
class scrapy.extensions.memusage.MemoryUsage
Note: This extension does not work in Windows.
Monitors the memory used by the Scrapy process that runs the spider and:
1. sends a notification e-mail when it exceeds a certain value
2. closes the spider when it exceeds a certain value
The notification e-mails can be triggered when a certain warning value is reached (MEMUSAGE_WARNING_MB) and
when the maximum value is reached (MEMUSAGE_LIMIT_MB) which will also cause the spider to be closed and the
Scrapy process to be terminated.

This extension is enabled by the MEMUSAGE_ENABLED setting and can be configured with the following settings:
MEMUSAGE_LIMIT_MB
MEMUSAGE_WARNING_MB
MEMUSAGE_REPORT
Memory debugger extension
class scrapy.extensions.memdebug.MemoryDebugger
An extension for debugging memory usage. It collects information about:
objects uncollected by the Python garbage collector
objects left alive that shouldnt. For more info, see Debugging memory leaks with trackref
To enable this extension, turn on the MEMDEBUG_ENABLED setting. The info will be stored in the stats.
Close spider extension
class scrapy.extensions.closespider.CloseSpider
Closes a spider automatically when some conditions are met, using a specific closing reason for each condition.
The conditions for closing a spider can be configured through the following settings:
CLOSESPIDER_TIMEOUT
CLOSESPIDER_ITEMCOUNT
CLOSESPIDER_PAGECOUNT
CLOSESPIDER_ERRORCOUNT
CLOSESPIDER_TIMEOUT Default: 0
An integer which specifies a number of seconds. If the spider remains open for more than that number of second, it
will be automatically closed with the reason closespider_timeout. If zero (or non set), spiders wont be closed
by timeout.
CLOSESPIDER_ITEMCOUNT Default: 0
An integer which specifies a number of items. If the spider scrapes more than that amount if items and those items are
passed by the item pipeline, the spider will be closed with the reason closespider_itemcount. If zero (or non
set), spiders wont be closed by number of passed items.
CLOSESPIDER_PAGECOUNT New in version 0.11.

Default: 0
An integer which specifies the maximum number of responses to crawl. If the spider crawls more than that, the spider
will be closed with the reason closespider_pagecount. If zero (or non set), spiders wont be closed by number
of crawled responses.
6.4. Extensions 181

CLOSESPIDER_ERRORCOUNT New in version 0.11.

Default: 0
An integer which specifies the maximum number of errors to receive before closing the spider. If the spider generates
more than that number of errors, it will be closed with the reason closespider_errorcount. If zero (or non
set), spiders wont be closed by number of errors.
StatsMailer extension
class scrapy.extensions.statsmailer.StatsMailer
This simple extension can be used to send a notification e-mail every time a domain has finished scraping, including
the Scrapy stats collected. The email will be sent to all recipients specified in the STATSMAILER_RCPTS setting.
Debugging extensions
Stack trace dump extension
class scrapy.extensions.debug.StackTraceDump
Dumps information about the running process when a SIGQUIT or SIGUSR2 signal is received. The information
dumped is the following:
1. engine status (using scrapy.utils.engine.get_engine_status())
2. live references (see Debugging memory leaks with trackref )
3. stack trace of all threads
After the stack trace and engine status is dumped, the Scrapy process continues running normally.
This extension only works on POSIX-compliant platforms (ie. not Windows), because the SIGQUIT and SIGUSR2
signals are not available on Windows.
There are at least two ways to send Scrapy the SIGQUIT signal:
1. By pressing Ctrl-while a Scrapy process is running (Linux only?)
2. By running this command (assuming <pid> is the process id of the Scrapy process):
kill -QUIT <pid>
Debugger extension
class scrapy.extensions.debug.Debugger
Invokes a Python debugger inside a running Scrapy process when a SIGUSR2 signal is received. After the debugger
is exited, the Scrapy process continues running normally.
For more info see Debugging in Python.
This extension only works on POSIX-compliant platforms (ie. not Windows).

6.5 Core API

This section documents the Scrapy core API, and its intended for developers of extensions and middlewares.
6.5.1 Crawler API
The main entry point to Scrapy API is the Crawler object, passed to extensions through the from_crawler class
method. This object provides access to all Scrapy core components, and its the only way for extensions to access
them and hook their functionality into Scrapy. The Extension Manager is responsible for loading and keeping track of
installed extensions and its configured through the EXTENSIONS setting which contains a dictionary of all available
extensions and their order similar to how you configure the downloader middlewares.
class scrapy.crawler.Crawler(spidercls, settings)
The Crawler object must be instantiated with a scrapy.spiders.Spider subclass and a
scrapy.settings.Settings object.
settings
The settings manager of this crawler.
This is used by extensions & middlewares to access the Scrapy settings of this crawler.
For an introduction on Scrapy settings see Settings.
For the API see Settings class.
signals
The signals manager of this crawler.
This is used by extensions & middlewares to hook themselves into Scrapy functionality.
For an introduction on signals see Signals.
For the API see SignalManager class.
stats
The stats collector of this crawler.
This is used from extensions & middlewares to record stats of their behaviour, or access stats collected by
other extensions.
For an introduction on stats collection see Stats Collection.
For the API see StatsCollector class.
extensions
The extension manager that keeps track of enabled extensions.
Most extensions wont need to access this attribute.
For an introduction on extensions and a list of available extensions on Scrapy see Extensions.
engine
The execution engine, which coordinates the core crawling logic between the scheduler, downloader and
spiders.
Some extension may want to access the Scrapy engine, to inspect or modify the downloader and scheduler
behaviour, although this is an advanced use and this API is not yet stable.
6.5. Core API 183

spider
Spider currently being crawled. This is an instance of the spider class provided while constructing the
crawler, and it is created after the arguments given in the crawl() method.
crawl(*args, **kwargs)
Starts the crawler by instantiating its spider class with the given args and kwargs arguments, while setting
the execution engine in motion.
Returns a deferred that is fired when the crawl is finished.
class scrapy.crawler.CrawlerRunner(settings=None)
This is a convenient helper class that keeps track of, manages and runs crawlers inside an already setup Twisted
reactor.
The CrawlerRunner object must be instantiated with a Settings object.
This class shouldnt be needed (since Scrapy is responsible of using it accordingly) unless writing scripts that
manually handle the crawling process. See Run Scrapy from a script for an example.
crawl(crawler_or_spidercls, *args, **kwargs)
Run a crawler with the provided arguments.
It will call the given Crawlers crawl() method, while keeping track of it so it can be stopped later.
If crawler_or_spidercls isnt a Crawler instance, this method will try to create one using this parameter
as the spider class given to it.
Returns a deferred that is fired when the crawling is finished.
Parameters
crawler_or_spidercls (Crawler instance, Spider subclass or string) already
created crawler, or a spider class or spiders name inside the project to create it
args (list) arguments to initialize the spider
kwargs (dict) keyword arguments to initialize the spider
crawlers
Set of crawlers started by crawl() and managed by this class.
create_crawler(crawler_or_spidercls)
Return a Crawler object.
If crawler_or_spidercls is a Crawler, it is returned as-is.
If crawler_or_spidercls is a Spider subclass, a new Crawler is constructed for it.
If crawler_or_spidercls is a string, this function finds a spider with this name in a Scrapy project
(using spider loader), then creates a Crawler instance for it.
join()
Returns a deferred that is fired when all managed crawlers have completed their executions.
stop()
Stops simultaneously all the crawling jobs taking place.
Returns a deferred that is fired when they all have ended.
class scrapy.crawler.CrawlerProcess(settings=None)
Bases: scrapy.crawler.CrawlerRunner
A class to run multiple scrapy crawlers in a process simultaneously.
This class extends CrawlerRunner by adding support for starting a Twisted reactor and handling shutdown
signals, like the keyboard interrupt command Ctrl-C. It also configures top-level logging.

This utility should be a better fit than CrawlerRunner if you arent running another Twisted reactor within
your application.
The CrawlerProcess object must be instantiated with a Settings object.
This class shouldnt be needed (since Scrapy is responsible of using it accordingly) unless writing scripts that
manually handle the crawling process. See Run Scrapy from a script for an example.
crawl(crawler_or_spidercls, *args, **kwargs)
Run a crawler with the provided arguments.
It will call the given Crawlers crawl() method, while keeping track of it so it can be stopped later.
If crawler_or_spidercls isnt a Crawler instance, this method will try to create one using this parameter
as the spider class given to it.
Returns a deferred that is fired when the crawling is finished.
Parameters
crawler_or_spidercls (Crawler instance, Spider subclass or string) already
created crawler, or a spider class or spiders name inside the project to create it
args (list) arguments to initialize the spider
kwargs (dict) keyword arguments to initialize the spider
crawlers
Set of crawlers started by crawl() and managed by this class.
create_crawler(crawler_or_spidercls)
Return a Crawler object.
If crawler_or_spidercls is a Crawler, it is returned as-is.
If crawler_or_spidercls is a Spider subclass, a new Crawler is constructed for it.
If crawler_or_spidercls is a string, this function finds a spider with this name in a Scrapy project
(using spider loader), then creates a Crawler instance for it.
join()
Returns a deferred that is fired when all managed crawlers have completed their executions.
start(stop_after_crawl=True)
This method starts a Twisted reactor, adjusts its pool size to REACTOR_THREADPOOL_MAXSIZE, and
installs a DNS cache based on DNSCACHE_ENABLED and DNSCACHE_SIZE.
If stop_after_crawl is True, the reactor will be stopped after all crawlers have finished, using join().
Parameters stop_after_crawl (boolean) stop or not the reactor when all crawlers
have finished
stop()
Stops simultaneously all the crawling jobs taking place.
Returns a deferred that is fired when they all have ended.
6.5.2 Settings API
scrapy.settings.SETTINGS_PRIORITIES
Dictionary that sets the key name and priority level of the default settings priorities used in Scrapy.
Each item defines a settings entry point, giving it a code name for identification and an integer priority. Greater
priorities take more precedence over lesser ones when setting and retrieving values in the Settings class.
6.5. Core API 185

SETTINGS_PRIORITIES = {
'default': 0,
'command': 10,
'project': 20,
'spider': 30,
'cmdline': 40,
}
For a detailed explanation on each settings sources, see: Settings.

scrapy.settings.get_settings_priority(priority)
Small helper function that looks up a given string priority in the SETTINGS_PRIORITIES dictionary and
returns its numerical value, or directly returns a given numerical priority.
class scrapy.settings.Settings(values=None, priority=project)
Bases: scrapy.settings.BaseSettings
This object stores Scrapy settings for the configuration of internal components, and can be used for any further
customization.
It is a direct subclass and supports all methods of BaseSettings. Additionally, after instantiation of this
class, the new object will have the global default settings described on Built-in settings reference already popu-
lated.
class scrapy.settings.BaseSettings(values=None, priority=project)
Instances of this class behave like dictionaries, but store priorities along with their (key, value) pairs, and
can be frozen (i.e. marked immutable).
Key-value entries can be passed on initialization with the values argument, and they would take the
priority level (unless values is already an instance of BaseSettings, in which case the existing
priority levels will be kept). If the priority argument is a string, the priority name will be looked up in
SETTINGS_PRIORITIES. Otherwise, a specific integer should be provided.
Once the object is created, new settings can be loaded or updated with the set() method, and can be ac-
cessed with the square bracket notation of dictionaries, or with the get() method of the instance and its value
conversion variants. When requesting a stored key, the value with the highest priority will be retrieved.
copy()
Make a deep copy of current settings.
This method returns a new instance of the Settings class, populated with the same values and their
priorities.
Modifications to the new object wont be reflected on the original settings.
copy_to_dict()
Make a copy of current settings and convert to a dict.
This method returns a new dict populated with the same values and their priorities as the current settings.
Modifications to the returned dict wont be reflected on the original settings.
This method can be useful for example for printing settings in Scrapy shell.
freeze()
Disable further changes to the current settings.
After calling this method, the present state of the settings will become immutable. Trying to change values
through the set() method and its variants wont be possible and will be alerted.
frozencopy()
Return an immutable copy of the current settings.

Alias for a freeze() call in the object returned by copy().

get(name, default=None)
Get a setting value without affecting its original type.
Parameters
name (string) the setting name
default (any) the value to return if no setting is found
getbool(name, default=False)
Get a setting value as a boolean.
1, 1, True and True return True, while 0, 0, False, False and None return False.
For example, settings populated through environment variables set to 0 will return False when using
this method.
Parameters
getdict(name, default=None)
Get a setting value as a dictionary. If the setting original type is a dictionary, a copy of it will be returned.
If it is a string it will be evaluated as a JSON dictionary. In the case that it is a BaseSettings instance
itself, it will be converted to a dictionary, containing all its current settings values as they would be returned
by get(), and losing all information about priority and mutability.
Parameters
getfloat(name, default=0.0)
Get a setting value as a float.
Parameters
getint(name, default=0)
Get a setting value as an int.
Parameters
getlist(name, default=None)
Get a setting value as a list. If the setting original type is a list, a copy of it will be returned. If its a string
it will be split by ,.
For example, settings populated through environment variables set to one,two will return a list [one,
two] when using this method.
Parameters
6.5. Core API 187

getpriority(name)
Return the current numerical priority value of a setting, or None if the given name does not exist.
Parameters name (string) the setting name
getwithbase(name)
Get a composition of a dictionary-like setting and its _BASE counterpart.
Parameters name (string) name of the dictionary-like setting
maxpriority()
Return the numerical value of the highest priority present throughout all settings, or the numerical value
for default from SETTINGS_PRIORITIES if there are no settings stored.
set(name, value, priority=project)
Store a key/value attribute with a given priority.
Settings should be populated before configuring the Crawler object (through the configure() method),
otherwise they wont have any effect.
Parameters
value (any) the value to associate with the setting
priority (string or int) the priority of the setting. Should be a key of
SETTINGS_PRIORITIES or an integer
setmodule(module, priority=project)
Store settings from a module with a given priority.
This is a helper function that calls set() for every globally declared uppercase variable of module with
the provided priority.
Parameters
module (module object or string) the module or the path of the module
priority (string or int) the priority of the settings. Should be a key of
update(values, priority=project)
Store key/value pairs with a given priority.
This is a helper function that calls set() for every item of values with the provided priority.
If values is a string, it is assumed to be JSON-encoded and parsed into a dict with json.loads()
first. If it is a BaseSettings instance, the per-key priorities will be used and the priority parameter
ignored. This allows inserting/updating settings with different priorities with a single command.
Parameters
values (dict or string or BaseSettings) the settings names and values
priority (string or int) the priority of the settings. Should be a key of
6.5.3 SpiderLoader API
class scrapy.loader.SpiderLoader
This class is in charge of retrieving and handling the spider classes defined across the project.

Custom spider loaders can be employed by specifying their path in the SPIDER_LOADER_CLASS project
setting. They must fully implement the scrapy.interfaces.ISpiderLoader interface to guarantee an
errorless execution.
from_settings(settings)
This class method is used by Scrapy to create an instance of the class. Its called with the current project
settings, and it loads the spiders found recursively in the modules of the SPIDER_MODULES setting.
Parameters settings (Settings instance) project settings
load(spider_name)
Get the Spider class with the given name. Itll look into the previously loaded spiders for a spider class
with name spider_name and will raise a KeyError if not found.
Parameters spider_name (str) spider class name
list()
Get the names of the available spiders in the project.
find_by_request(request)
List the spiders names that can handle the given request. Will try to match the requests url against the
domains of the spiders.
Parameters request (Request instance) queried request
6.5.4 Signals API
class scrapy.signalmanager.SignalManager(sender=_Anonymous)
connect(receiver, signal, **kwargs)

Connect a receiver function to a signal.
The signal can be any object, although Scrapy comes with some predefined signals that are documented in
the Signals section.
Parameters
receiver (callable) the function to be connected
signal (object) the signal to connect to
disconnect(receiver, signal, **kwargs)
Disconnect a receiver function from a signal. This has the opposite effect of the connect() method, and
the arguments are the same.
disconnect_all(signal, **kwargs)
Disconnect all receivers from the given signal.
Parameters signal (object) the signal to disconnect from
send_catch_log(signal, **kwargs)
Send a signal, catch exceptions and log them.
The keyword arguments are passed to the signal handlers (connected through the connect() method).
send_catch_log_deferred(signal, **kwargs)
Like send_catch_log() but supports returning deferreds from signal handlers.
Returns a Deferred that gets fired once all signal handlers deferreds were fired. Send a signal, catch
exceptions and log them.
The keyword arguments are passed to the signal handlers (connected through the connect() method).
6.5. Core API 189

6.5.5 Stats Collector API
There are several Stats Collectors available under the scrapy.statscollectors module and they all implement
the Stats Collector API defined by the StatsCollector class (which they all inherit from).
class scrapy.statscollectors.StatsCollector
get_value(key, default=None)
Return the value for the given stats key or default if it doesnt exist.
get_stats()
Get all stats from the currently running spider as a dict.
set_value(key, value)
Set the given value for the given stats key.
set_stats(stats)
Override the current stats with the dict passed in stats argument.
inc_value(key, count=1, start=0)
Increment the value of the given stats key, by the given count, assuming the start value given (when its not
set).
max_value(key, value)
Set the given value for the given key only if current value for the same key is lower than value. If there is
no current value for the given key, the value is always set.
min_value(key, value)
Set the given value for the given key only if current value for the same key is greater than value. If there is
no current value for the given key, the value is always set.
clear_stats()
Clear all stats.
The following methods are not part of the stats collection api but instead used when implementing custom stats
collectors:
open_spider(spider)
Open the given spider for stats collection.
close_spider(spider)
Close the given spider. After this is called, no more specific stats can be accessed or collected.
6.6 Signals
Scrapy uses signals extensively to notify when certain events occur. You can catch some of those signals in your
Scrapy project (using an extension, for example) to perform additional tasks or extend Scrapy to add functionality not
provided out of the box.
Even though signals provide several arguments, the handlers that catch them dont need to accept all of them - the
signal dispatching mechanism will only deliver the arguments that the handler receives.
You can connect to signals (or send your own) through the Signals API.
Here is a simple example showing how you can catch signals and perform some action:
from scrapy import Spider

class DmozSpider(Spider):
name = "dmoz"
allowed_domains = ["dmoz.org"]
start_urls = [
"http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Books/",
"http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Resources/",
]
@classmethod
def from_crawler(cls, crawler, *args, **kwargs):
spider = super(DmozSpider, cls).from_crawler(crawler, *args, **kwargs)
crawler.signals.connect(spider.spider_closed, signal=signals.spider_closed)
return spider

spider.logger.info('Spider closed: %s', spider.name)

pass
6.6.1 Deferred signal handlers
Some signals support returning Twisted deferreds from their handlers, see the Built-in signals reference below to know
which ones.
6.6.2 Built-in signals reference
Heres the list of Scrapy built-in signals and their meaning.
engine_started
scrapy.signals.engine_started()
Sent when the Scrapy engine has started crawling.
This signal supports returning deferreds from their handlers.
Note: This signal may be fired after the spider_opened signal, depending on how the spider was started. So
dont rely on this signal getting fired before spider_opened.
engine_stopped
scrapy.signals.engine_stopped()
Sent when the Scrapy engine is stopped (for example, when a crawling process has finished).
6.6. Signals 191

item_scraped
scrapy.signals.item_scraped(item, response, spider)

Sent when an item has been scraped, after it has passed all the Item Pipeline stages (without being dropped).
Parameters
item (dict or Item object) the item scraped
response (Response object) the response from where the item was scraped
item_dropped
scrapy.signals.item_dropped(item, response, exception, spider)

Sent after an item has been dropped from the Item Pipeline when some stage raised a DropItem exception.
Parameters
item (dict or Item object) the item dropped from the Item Pipeline
response (Response object) the response from where the item was dropped
exception (DropItem exception) the exception (which must be a DropItem sub-
class) which caused the item to be dropped
spider_closed
scrapy.signals.spider_closed(spider, reason)
Sent after a spider has been closed. This can be used to release per-spider resources reserved on
spider_opened.
Parameters
spider (Spider object) the spider which has been closed
reason (str) a string which describes the reason why the spider was closed. If it was
closed because the spider has completed scraping, the reason is finished. Otherwise,
if the spider was manually closed by calling the close_spider engine method, then
the reason is the one passed in the reason argument of that method (which defaults to
cancelled). If the engine was shutdown (for example, by hitting Ctrl-C to stop it) the
reason will be shutdown.
spider_opened
scrapy.signals.spider_opened(spider)
Sent after a spider has been opened for crawling. This is typically used to reserve per-spider resources, but can
be used for any task that needs to be performed when a spider is opened.

Parameters spider (Spider object) the spider which has been opened
spider_idle
scrapy.signals.spider_idle(spider)
Sent when a spider has gone idle, which means the spider has no further:
requests waiting to be downloaded
requests scheduled
items being processed in the item pipeline
If the idle state persists after all handlers of this signal have finished, the engine starts closing the spider. After
the spider has finished closing, the spider_closed signal is sent.
You can, for example, schedule some requests in your spider_idle handler to prevent the spider from being
closed.
This signal does not support returning deferreds from their handlers.
Parameters spider (Spider object) the spider which has gone idle
spider_error
scrapy.signals.spider_error(failure, response, spider)

Sent when a spider callback generates an error (ie. raises an exception).
Parameters
failure (Failure object) the exception raised as a Twisted Failure object
response (Response object) the response being processed when the exception was
raised
spider (Spider object) the spider which raised the exception
request_scheduled
scrapy.signals.request_scheduled(request, spider)
Sent when the engine schedules a Request, to be downloaded later.
The signal does not support returning deferreds from their handlers.
Parameters
request (Request object) the request that reached the scheduler
spider (Spider object) the spider that yielded the request
request_dropped
scrapy.signals.request_dropped(request, spider)
Sent when a Request, scheduled by the engine to be downloaded later, is rejected by the scheduler.
The signal does not support returning deferreds from their handlers.
Parameters
6.6. Signals 193

request (Request object) the request that reached the scheduler

spider (Spider object) the spider that yielded the request
response_received
scrapy.signals.response_received(response, request, spider)

Sent when the engine receives a new Response from the downloader.
Parameters
response (Response object) the response received
request (Request object) the request that generated the response
spider (Spider object) the spider for which the response is intended
response_downloaded
scrapy.signals.response_downloaded(response, request, spider)

Sent by the downloader right after a HTTPResponse is downloaded.
Parameters
response (Response object) the response downloaded
request (Request object) the request that generated the response
spider (Spider object) the spider for which the response is intended
6.7 Item Exporters
Once you have scraped your items, you often want to persist or export those items, to use the data in some other
application. That is, after all, the whole purpose of the scraping process.
For this purpose Scrapy provides a collection of Item Exporters for different output formats, such as XML, CSV or
JSON.
6.7.1 Using Item Exporters
If you are in a hurry, and just want to use an Item Exporter to output scraped data see the Feed exports. Otherwise, if
you want to know how Item Exporters work or need more custom functionality (not covered by the default exports),
continue reading below.
In order to use an Item Exporter, you must instantiate it with its required args. Each Item Exporter requires different
arguments, so check each exporter documentation to be sure, in Built-in Item Exporters reference. After you have
instantiated your exporter, you have to:
1. call the method start_exporting() in order to signal the beginning of the exporting process
2. call the export_item() method for each item you want to export
3. and finally call the finish_exporting() to signal the end of the exporting process

Here you can see an Item Pipeline which uses an Item Exporter to export scraped items to different files, one per
spider:
from scrapy.exporters import XmlItemExporter
class XmlExportPipeline(object):
def __init__(self):
self.files = {}
@classmethod
pipeline = cls()
crawler.signals.connect(pipeline.spider_opened, signals.spider_opened)
crawler.signals.connect(pipeline.spider_closed, signals.spider_closed)
return pipeline
def spider_opened(self, spider):

file = open('%s_products.xml' % spider.name, 'w+b')
self.files[spider] = file
self.exporter = XmlItemExporter(file)
self.exporter.start_exporting()

self.exporter.finish_exporting()
file = self.files.pop(spider)
file.close()

self.exporter.export_item(item)
return item
6.7.2 Serialization of item fields
By default, the field values are passed unmodified to the underlying serialization library, and the decision of how to
serialize them is delegated to each particular serialization library.
However, you can customize how each field value is serialized before it is passed to the serialization library.
There are two ways to customize how a field will be serialized, which are described next.
1. Declaring a serializer in the field
If you use Item you can declare a serializer in the field metadata. The serializer must be a callable which receives a
value and returns its serialized form.
Example:
import scrapy
def serialize_price(value):
return '$ %s' % str(value)
price = scrapy.Field(serializer=serialize_price)
6.7. Item Exporters 195

2. Overriding the serialize_field() method
You can also override the serialize_field() method to customize how your field value will be exported.
Make sure you call the base class serialize_field() method after your custom code.
Example:
from scrapy.exporter import XmlItemExporter
class ProductXmlExporter(XmlItemExporter):
def serialize_field(self, field, name, value):

if field == 'price':
return '$ %s' % str(value)
return super(Product, self).serialize_field(field, name, value)
6.7.3 Built-in Item Exporters reference
Here is a list of the Item Exporters bundled with Scrapy. Some of them contain output examples, which assume youre
exporting these two items:
Item(name='Color TV', price='1200')
Item(name='DVD player', price='200')
BaseItemExporter
class scrapy.exporters.BaseItemExporter(fields_to_export=None, export_empty_fields=False,

encoding=utf-8)
This is the (abstract) base class for all Item Exporters. It provides support for common features used by all
(concrete) Item Exporters, such as defining what fields to export, whether to export empty fields, or which
encoding to use.
These features can be configured through the constructor arguments which populate their respective instance
attributes: fields_to_export, export_empty_fields, encoding.
export_item(item)
Exports the given item. This method must be implemented in subclasses.
serialize_field(field, name, value)
Return the serialized value for the given field. You can override this method (in your custom Item Ex-
porters) if you want to control how a particular field or value will be serialized/exported.
By default, this method looks for a serializer declared in the item field and returns the result of applying
that serializer to the value. If no serializer is found, it returns the value unchanged except for unicode
values which are encoded to str using the encoding declared in the encoding attribute.
Parameters
field (Field object or an empty dict) the field being serialized. If a raw dict is being
exported (not Item) field value is an empty dict.
name (str) the name of the field being serialized
value the value being serialized
start_exporting()
Signal the beginning of the exporting process. Some exporters may use this to generate some required
header (for example, the XmlItemExporter). You must call this method before exporting any items.

finish_exporting()
Signal the end of the exporting process. Some exporters may use this to generate some required footer (for
example, the XmlItemExporter). You must always call this method after you have no more items to
export.
fields_to_export
A list with the name of the fields that will be exported, or None if you want to export all fields. Defaults to
None.
Some exporters (like CsvItemExporter) respect the order of the fields defined in this attribute.
Some exporters may require fields_to_export list in order to export the data properly when spiders return
dicts (not Item instances).
export_empty_fields
Whether to include empty/unpopulated item fields in the exported data. Defaults to False. Some ex-
porters (like CsvItemExporter) ignore this attribute and always export all empty fields.
This option is ignored for dict items.
encoding
The encoding that will be used to encode unicode values. This only affects unicode values (which are
always serialized to str using this encoding). Other value types are passed unchanged to the specific
serialization library.
XmlItemExporter
class scrapy.exporters.XmlItemExporter(file, item_element=item, root_element=items,

**kwargs)
Exports Items in XML format to the specified file object.
Parameters
file the file-like object to use for exporting the data.
root_element (str) The name of root element in the exported XML.
item_element (str) The name of each item element in the exported XML.
The additional keyword arguments of this constructor are passed to the BaseItemExporter constructor.
A typical output of this exporter would be:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<items>
<item>
<name>Color TV</name>
<price>1200</price>
</item>
<item>
<name>DVD player</name>
<price>200</price>
</item>
</items>
Unless overridden in the serialize_field() method, multi-valued fields are exported by serializing each
value inside a <value> element. This is for convenience, as multi-valued fields are very common.
For example, the item:
Item(name=['John', 'Doe'], age='23')

Would be serialized as:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<items>
<item>
<name>
<value>John</value>
<value>Doe</value>
</name>
<age>23</age>
</item>
</items>
CsvItemExporter
class scrapy.exporters.CsvItemExporter(file, include_headers_line=True, join_multivalued=, ,

**kwargs)
Exports Items in CSV format to the given file-like object. If the fields_to_export attribute is set, it will
be used to define the CSV columns and their order. The export_empty_fields attribute has no effect on
this exporter.
Parameters
include_headers_line (str) If enabled, makes the exporter output a header line
with the field names taken from BaseItemExporter.fields_to_export or the
first exported item fields.
join_multivalued The char (or chars) that will be used for joining multi-valued
fields, if found.
The additional keyword arguments of this constructor are passed to the BaseItemExporter constructor,
and the leftover arguments to the csv.writer constructor, so you can use any csv.writer constructor argument to
customize this exporter.
product,price
Color TV,1200
DVD player,200
PickleItemExporter
class scrapy.exporters.PickleItemExporter(file, protocol=0, **kwargs)

Exports Items in pickle format to the given file-like object.
Parameters
protocol (int) The pickle protocol to use.
For more information, refer to the pickle module documentation.
Pickle isnt a human readable format, so no output examples are provided.

PprintItemExporter
class scrapy.exporters.PprintItemExporter(file, **kwargs)

Exports Items in pretty print format to the specified file object.
Parameters file the file-like object to use for exporting the data.
{'name': 'Color TV', 'price': '1200'}
{'name': 'DVD player', 'price': '200'}
Longer lines (when present) are pretty-formatted.
JsonItemExporter
class scrapy.exporters.JsonItemExporter(file, **kwargs)

Exports Items in JSON format to the specified file-like object, writing all objects as a list of objects. The addi-
tional constructor arguments are passed to the BaseItemExporter constructor, and the leftover arguments
to the JSONEncoder constructor, so you can use any JSONEncoder constructor argument to customize this
exporter.
[{"name": "Color TV", "price": "1200"},
{"name": "DVD player", "price": "200"}]
Warning: JSON is very simple and flexible serialization format, but it doesnt scale well for large amounts
of data since incremental (aka. stream-mode) parsing is not well supported (if at all) among JSON parsers (on
any language), and most of them just parse the entire object in memory. If you want the power and simplicity
of JSON with a more stream-friendly format, consider using JsonLinesItemExporter instead, or
splitting the output in multiple chunks.
JsonLinesItemExporter
class scrapy.exporters.JsonLinesItemExporter(file, **kwargs)

Exports Items in JSON format to the specified file-like object, writing one JSON-encoded item per line. The
additional constructor arguments are passed to the BaseItemExporter constructor, and the leftover argu-
ments to the JSONEncoder constructor, so you can use any JSONEncoder constructor argument to customize
this exporter.
{"name": "Color TV", "price": "1200"}
{"name": "DVD player", "price": "200"}
Unlike the one produced by JsonItemExporter, the format produced by this exporter is well suited for
serializing large amounts of data.
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).

CHAPTER 7
All the rest
7.1 Release notes
7.1.1 Scrapy 1.3.2 (2017-02-13)
Bug fixes
Preserve crequest class when converting to/from dicts (utils.reqser) (issue 2510).
Use consistent selectors for author field in tutorial (issue 2551).
Fix TLS compatibility in Twisted 17+ (issue 2558)
7.1.2 Scrapy 1.3.1 (2017-02-08)
New features
Support True and False string values for boolean settings (issue 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 (issue 2457).
Add support for Python 3.6 (issue 2485).
Run tests on PyPy (warning: some tests still fail, so PyPy is not supported yet).
Bug fixes
Enforce DNS_TIMEOUT setting (issue 2496).

Fix view command ; it was a regression in v1.3.0 (issue 2503).
Fix tests regarding *_EXPIRES settings with Files/Images pipelines (issue 2460).
Fix name of generated pipeline class when using basic project template (issue 2466).
Fix compatiblity with Twisted 17+ (issue 2496, issue 2528).
Fix scrapy.Item inheritance on Python 3.6 (issue 2511).
Enforce numeric values for components order in SPIDER_MIDDLEWARES, DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES,
EXTENIONS and SPIDER_CONTRACTS (issue 2420).
201
Documentation
Reword Code of Coduct section and upgrade to Contributor Covenant v1.4 (issue 2469).
Clarify that passing spider arguments converts them to spider attributes (issue 2483).
Document formid argument on FormRequest.from_response() (issue 2497).
Add .rst extension to README files (issue 2507).
Mention LevelDB cache storage backend (issue 2525).
Use yield in sample callback code (issue 2533).
Add note about HTML entities decoding with .re()/.re_first() (issue 1704).
Typos (issue 2512, issue 2534, issue 2531).
Cleanups
Remove reduntant check in MetaRefreshMiddleware (issue 2542).

Faster checks in LinkExtractor for allow/deny patterns (issue 2538).
Remove dead code supporting old Twisted versions (issue 2544).
7.1.3 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 (issue 2272)
scrapy fetch url, scrapy shell url and fetch(url) inside scrapy shell now follow HTTP redi-
rections by default (issue 2290); See fetch and shell for details.
HttpErrorMiddleware now logs errors with INFO level instead of DEBUG; this is technically backwards
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 backwards 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.
202 Chapter 7. All the rest

7.1.4 Scrapy 1.2.2 (2016-12-06)
Bug fixes
Fix a cryptic traceback when a pipeline fails on open_spider() (issue 2011)

Fix embedded IPython shell variables (fixing issue 396 that re-appeared in 1.2.0, fixed in issue 2418)
A couple of patches when dealing with robots.txt:
handle (non-standard) relative sitemap URLs (issue 2390)
handle non-ASCII URLs and User-Agents in Python 2 (issue 2373)
Documentation
Document "download_latency" key in Requests meta dict (issue 2033)

Remove page on (deprecated & unsupported) Ubuntu packages from ToC (issue 2335)
A few fixed typos (issue 2346, issue 2369, issue 2369, issue 2380) and clarifications (issue 2354, issue 2325,
issue 2414)
Other changes
Advertize conda-forge as Scrapys official conda channel (issue 2387)

More helpful error messages when trying to use .css() or .xpath() on non-Text Responses (issue 2264)
startproject command now generates a sample middlewares.py file (issue 2335)
Add more dependencies version info in scrapy version verbose output (issue 2404)
Remove all *.pyc files from source distribution (issue 2386)
7.1.5 Scrapy 1.2.1 (2016-10-21)
Bug fixes
Include OpenSSLs more permissive default ciphers when establishing TLS/SSL connections (issue 2314).
Fix Location HTTP header decoding on non-ASCII URL redirects (issue 2321).
Documentation
Fix JsonWriterPipeline example (issue 2302).

Various notes: issue 2330 on spider names, issue 2329 on middleware methods processing order, issue 2327 on
getting multi-valued HTTP headers as lists.
Other changes
Removed www. from start_urls in built-in spider templates (issue 2299).
7.1. Release notes 203

7.1.6 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 (issue 2034).
startproject command now supports an optional destination directory to override the default one based on
the project name (issue 2005).
New SCHEDULER_DEBUG setting to log requests serialization failures (issue 1610).
JSON encoder now supports serialization of set instances (issue 2058).
Interpret application/json-amazonui-streaming as TextResponse (issue 1503).
scrapy is imported by default when using shell tools (shell, inspect_response) (issue 2248).
Bug fixes
DefaultRequestHeaders middleware now runs before UserAgent middleware (issue 2088). Warning: this is
technically backwards incompatible, though we consider this a bug fix.
HTTP cache extension and plugins that use the .scrapy data directory now work outside projects (issue 1581).
Warning: this is technically backwards incompatible, though we consider this a bug fix.
Selector does not allow passing both response and text anymore (issue 2153).
Fixed logging of wrong callback name with scrapy parse (issue 2169).
Fix for an odd gzip decompression bug (issue 1606).
Fix for selected callbacks when using CrawlSpider with scrapy parse (issue 2225).
Fix for invalid JSON and XML files when spider yields no items (issue 872).
Implement flush() fpr StreamLogger avoiding a warning in logs (issue 2125).
Refactoring
canonicalize_url has been moved to w3lib.url (issue 2168).
Tests & Requirements
Scrapys 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 its not tested anymore).
Documentation
Grammar fixes: issue 2128, issue 1566.

Download stats badge removed from README (issue 2160).

New scrapy architecture diagram (issue 2165).

Updated Response parameters documentation (issue 2197).
Reworded misleading RANDOMIZE_DOWNLOAD_DELAY description (issue 2190).
Add StackOverflow as a support channel (issue 2257).
7.1.7 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
(issue 2243, fixes issue 2198)
Documentation
Overview and tutorial rewritten to use http://toscrape.com websites (issue 2236, issue 2249, issue 2252).
7.1.8 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)
7.1.9 Scrapy 1.1.1 (2016-07-13)
Bug fixes
Add Host header in CONNECT requests to HTTPS proxies (issue 2069)

Use response body when choosing response class (issue 2001, fixes issue 2000)
Do not fail on canonicalizing URLs with wrong netlocs (issue 2038, fixes issue 2010)
a few fixes for HttpCompressionMiddleware (and SitemapSpider):
Do not decode HEAD responses (issue 2008, fixes issue 1899)
Handle charset parameter in gzip Content-Type header (issue 2050, fixes issue 2049)
Do not decompress gzip octet-stream responses (issue 2065, fixes issue 2063)
Catch (and ignore with a warning) exception when verifying certificate against IP-address hosts (issue 2094,
fixes issue 2092)
Make FilesPipeline and ImagesPipeline backward compatible again regarding the use of legacy class
attributes for customization (issue 1989, fixes issue 1985)

New features
Enable genspider command outside project folder (issue 2052)

Retry HTTPS CONNECT TunnelError by default (issue 1974)
Documentation
FEED_TEMPDIR setting at lexicographical position (commit 9b3c72c)

Use idiomatic .extract_first() in overview (issue 1994)
Update years in copyright notice (commit c2c8036)
Add information and example on errbacks (issue 1995)
Use url variable in downloader middleware example (issue 2015)
Grammar fixes (issue 2054, issue 2120)
New FAQ entry on using BeautifulSoup in spider callbacks (issue 2048)
Add notes about scrapy not working on Windows with Python 3 (issue 2060)
Encourage complete titles in pull requests (issue 2026)
Tests
Upgrade py.test requirement on Travis CI and Pin pytest-cov to 2.2.1 (issue 2095)
7.1.10 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 (issue 1467).
FormRequest.from_response improvements (issue 1382, issue 1137).
Added setting AUTOTHROTTLE_TARGET_CONCURRENCY and improved AutoThrottle docs (issue
1324).
Added response.text to get body as unicode (issue 1730).
Anonymous S3 connections (issue 1358).
Deferreds in downloader middlewares (issue 1473). This enables better robots.txt handling (issue 1471).
HTTP caching now follows RFC2616 more closely, added settings HTTPCACHE_ALWAYS_STORE and
HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_RESPONSE_CACHE_CONTROLS (issue 1151).
Selectors were extracted to the parsel library (issue 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.
These bug fixes may require your attention:

Dont retry bad requests (HTTP 400) by default (issue 1289). If you need the old behavior, add 400 to
RETRY_HTTP_CODES.
Fix shell files argument handling (issue 1710, issue 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 (issue 1724). Scrapy will also
wait for robots.txt to be downloaded before proceeding with the crawl (issue 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 (issue 1080). If you use
PythonItemExporter, you may want to update your code to disable binary mode which is now dep-
recated.
Accept XML node names containing dots as valid (issue 1533).
When uploading files or images to S3 (with FilesPipeline or ImagesPipeline), the default
ACL policy is now private instead of public Warning: backwards incompatible!. You can use
FILES_STORE_S3_ACL to change it.
Weve reimplemented canonicalize_url() for more correct output, especially for URLs with non-
ASCII characters (issue 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:
backwards 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 (issue 1681).

Command line tool now has completion for zsh (issue 934).
Improvements to scrapy shell:
Support for bpython and configure preferred Python shell via SCRAPY_PYTHON_SHELL (issue 1100,
issue 1444).
Support URLs without scheme (issue 1498) Warning: backwards incompatible!
Bring back support for relative file path (issue 1710, issue 1550).
Added MEMUSAGE_CHECK_INTERVAL_SECONDS setting to change default check interval (issue 1282).
Download handlers are now lazy-loaded on first request using their scheme (issue 1390, issue 1421).

HTTPS download handlers do not force TLS 1.0 anymore; instead, OpenSSLs
SSLv23_method()/TLS_method() is used allowing to try negotiating with the remote hosts the
highest TLS protocol version it can (issue 1794, issue 1629).
RedirectMiddleware now skips the status codes from handle_httpstatus_list on spider attribute
or in Requests meta key (issue 1334, issue 1364, issue 1447).
Form submission:
now works with <button> elements too (issue 1469).
an empty string is now used for submit buttons without a value (issue 1472)
Dict-like settings now have per-key priorities (issue 1135, issue 1149 and issue 1586).
Sending non-ASCII emails (issue 1662)
CloseSpider and SpiderState extensions now get disabled if no relevant setting is set (issue 1723, issue
1725).
Added method ExecutionEngine.close (issue 1423).
Added method CrawlerRunner.create_crawler (issue 1528).
Scheduler priority queue can now be customized via SCHEDULER_PRIORITY_QUEUE (issue 1822).
.pps links are now ignored by default in link extractors (issue 1835).
temporary data folder for FTP and S3 feed storages can be customized using a new FEED_TEMPDIR setting
(issue 1847).
FilesPipeline and ImagesPipeline settings are now instance attributes instead of class attributes,
enabling spider-specific behaviors (issue 1891).
JsonItemExporter now formats opening and closing square brackets on their own line (first and last lines
of output file) (issue 1950).
If available, botocore is used for S3FeedStorage, S3DownloadHandler and S3FilesStore (issue
1761, issue 1883).
Tons of documentation updates and related fixes (issue 1291, issue 1302, issue 1335, issue 1683, issue 1660,
issue 1642, issue 1721, issue 1727, issue 1879).
Other refactoring, optimizations and cleanup (issue 1476, issue 1481, issue 1477, issue 1315, issue 1290, issue
1750, issue 1881).
Deprecations and Removals
Added to_bytes and to_unicode, deprecated str_to_unicode and unicode_to_str functions

(issue 778).
binary_is_text is introduced, to replace use of isbinarytext (but with inverse return value) (issue
1851)
The optional_features set has been removed (issue 1359).
The --lsprof command line option has been removed (issue 1689). Warning: backward incompatible, but
doesnt break user code.
The following datatypes were deprecated (issue 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
telnetconsole was relocated to extensions/ (issue 1524).

Note: telnet is not enabled on Python 3 (https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy/pull/1524#issuecomment-
146985595)
Bugfixes
Scrapy does not retry requests that got a HTTP 400 Bad Request response anymore (issue 1289). Warn-
ing: backwards incompatible!
Support empty password for http_proxy config (issue 1274).
Interpret application/x-json as TextResponse (issue 1333).
Support link rel attribute with multiple values (issue 1201).
Fixed scrapy.http.FormRequest.from_response when there is a <base> tag (issue 1564).
Fixed TEMPLATES_DIR handling (issue 1575).
Various FormRequest fixes (issue 1595, issue 1596, issue 1597).
Makes _monkeypatches more robust (issue 1634).
Fixed bug on XMLItemExporter with non-string fields in items (issue 1738).
Fixed startproject command in OS X (issue 1635).
Fixed PythonItemExporter and CSVExporter for non-string item types (issue 1737).
Various logging related fixes (issue 1294, issue 1419, issue 1263, issue 1624, issue 1654, issue 1722, issue 1726
and issue 1303).
Fixed bug in utils.template.render_templatefile() (issue 1212).
sitemaps extraction from robots.txt is now case-insensitive (issue 1902).
HTTPS+CONNECT tunnels could get mixed up when using multiple proxies to same remote host (issue 1912).
7.1.11 Scrapy 1.0.6 (2016-05-04)
FIX: RetryMiddleware is now robust to non-standard HTTP status codes (issue 1857)
FIX: Filestorage HTTP cache was checking wrong modified time (issue 1875)
DOC: Support for Sphinx 1.4+ (issue 1893)
DOC: Consistency in selectors examples (issue 1869)
7.1.12 Scrapy 1.0.5 (2016-02-04)
FIX: [Backport] Ignore bogus links in LinkExtractors (fixes issue 907, commit 108195e)
TST: Changed buildbot makefile to use pytest (commit 1f3d90a)

DOC: Fixed typos in tutorial and media-pipeline (commit 808a9ea and commit 803bd87)
DOC: Add AjaxCrawlMiddleware to DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES_BASE in settings docs (commit
aa94121)
7.1.13 Scrapy 1.0.4 (2015-12-30)
Ignoring xlib/tx folder, depending on Twisted version. (commit 7dfa979)

Run on new travis-ci infra (commit 6e42f0b)
Spelling fixes (commit 823a1cc)
escape nodename in xmliter regex (commit da3c155)
test xml nodename with dots (commit 4418fc3)
TST dont use broken Pillow version in tests (commit a55078c)
disable log on version command. closes #1426 (commit 86fc330)
disable log on startproject command (commit db4c9fe)
Add PyPI download stats badge (commit df2b944)
dont run tests twice on Travis if a PR is made from a scrapy/scrapy branch (commit a83ab41)
Add Python 3 porting status badge to the README (commit 73ac80d)
fixed RFPDupeFilter persistence (commit 97d080e)
TST a test to show that dupefilter persistence is not working (commit 97f2fb3)
explicit close file on file:// scheme handler (commit d9b4850)
Disable dupefilter in shell (commit c0d0734)
DOC: Add captions to toctrees which appear in sidebar (commit aa239ad)
DOC Removed pywin32 from install instructions as its already declared as dependency. (commit 10eb400)
Added installation notes about using Conda for Windows and other OSes. (commit 1c3600a)
Fixed minor grammar issues. (commit 7f4ddd5)
fixed a typo in the documentation. (commit b71f677)
Version 1 now exists (commit 5456c0e)
fix another invalid xpath error (commit 0a1366e)
fix ValueError: Invalid XPath: //div/[id=not-exists]/text() on selectors.rst (commit ca8d60f)
Typos corrections (commit 7067117)
fix typos in downloader-middleware.rst and exceptions.rst, middlware -> middleware (commit 32f115c)
Add note to ubuntu install section about debian compatibility (commit 23fda69)
Replace alternative OSX install workaround with virtualenv (commit 98b63ee)
Reference Homebrews homepage for installation instructions (commit 1925db1)
Add oldest supported tox version to contributing docs (commit 5d10d6d)
Note in install docs about pip being already included in python>=2.7.9 (commit 85c980e)
Add non-python dependencies to Ubuntu install section in the docs (commit fbd010d)

Add OS X installation section to docs (commit d8f4cba)

DOC(ENH): specify path to rtd theme explicitly (commit de73b1a)
minor: scrapy.Spider docs grammar (commit 1ddcc7b)
Make common practices sample code match the comments (commit 1b85bcf)
nextcall repetitive calls (heartbeats). (commit 55f7104)
Backport fix compatibility with Twisted 15.4.0 (commit b262411)
pin pytest to 2.7.3 (commit a6535c2)
Merge pull request #1512 from mgedmin/patch-1 (commit 8876111)
Merge pull request #1513 from mgedmin/patch-2 (commit 5d4daf8)
Typo (commit f8d0682)
Fix list formatting (commit 5f83a93)
fix scrapy squeue tests after recent changes to queuelib (commit 3365c01)
Merge pull request #1475 from rweindl/patch-1 (commit 2d688cd)
Update tutorial.rst (commit fbc1f25)
Merge pull request #1449 from rhoekman/patch-1 (commit 7d6538c)
Small grammatical change (commit 8752294)
Add openssl version to version command (commit 13c45ac)
7.1.14 Scrapy 1.0.3 (2015-08-11)
add service_identity to scrapy install_requires (commit cbc2501)

Workaround for travis#296 (commit 66af9cd)
7.1.15 Scrapy 1.0.2 (2015-08-06)
Twisted 15.3.0 does not raises PicklingError serializing lambda functions (commit b04dd7d)
Minor method name fix (commit 6f85c7f)
minor: scrapy.Spider grammar and clarity (commit 9c9d2e0)
Put a blurb about support channels in CONTRIBUTING (commit c63882b)
Fixed typos (commit a9ae7b0)
Fix doc reference. (commit 7c8a4fe)
7.1.16 Scrapy 1.0.1 (2015-07-01)
Unquote request path before passing to FTPClient, it already escape paths (commit cc00ad2)
include tests/ to source distribution in MANIFEST.in (commit eca227e)
DOC Fix SelectJmes documentation (commit b8567bc)
DOC Bring Ubuntu and Archlinux outside of Windows subsection (commit 392233f)

DOC remove version suffix from ubuntu package (commit 5303c66)

DOC Update release date for 1.0 (commit c89fa29)
7.1.17 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()
return MyItem(url=response.url)
New version
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:
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 ins as default logging system. Were
maintaining backward compatibility for most of the old custom interface to call logging functions, but youll 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 youll have access to a custom logger
created for the spider to issue log events:
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. Heres a quick example
of how to run a Spider manually with the new API:
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
Theres 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


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.extensions.*
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
Plural renames and Modules unification

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
scrapy.spidermanager.SpiderManager scrapy.spiderloader.SpiderLoader
Settings renames
SPIDER_MANAGER_CLASS SPIDER_LOADER_CLASS
Changelog
New Features and Enhancements

Python logging (issue 1060, issue 1235, issue 1236, issue 1240, issue 1259, issue 1278, issue 1286)
FEED_EXPORT_FIELDS option (issue 1159, issue 1224)
Dns cache size and timeout options (issue 1132)
support namespace prefix in xmliter_lxml (issue 963)
Reactor threadpool max size setting (issue 1123)

Allow spiders to return dicts. (issue 1081)

Add Response.urljoin() helper (issue 1086)
look in ~/.config/scrapy.cfg for user config (issue 1098)
handle TLS SNI (issue 1101)
Selectorlist extract first (issue 624, issue 1145)
Added JmesSelect (issue 1016)
add gzip compression to filesystem http cache backend (issue 1020)
CSS support in link extractors (issue 983)
httpcache dont_cache meta #19 #689 (issue 821)
add signal to be sent when request is dropped by the scheduler (issue 961)
avoid download large response (issue 946)
Allow to specify the quotechar in CSVFeedSpider (issue 882)
Add referer to Spider error processing log message (issue 795)
process robots.txt once (issue 896)
GSoC Per-spider settings (issue 854)
Add project name validation (issue 817)
GSoC API cleanup (issue 816, issue 1128, issue 1147, issue 1148, issue 1156, issue 1185, issue 1187, issue
1258, issue 1268, issue 1276, issue 1285, issue 1284)
Be more responsive with IO operations (issue 1074 and issue 1075)
Do leveldb compaction for httpcache on closing (issue 1297)
Deprecations and Removals
Deprecate htmlparser link extractor (issue 1205)
remove deprecated code from FeedExporter (issue 1155)
a leftover for.15 compatibility (issue 925)
drop support for CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_SPIDER (issue 895)
Drop old engine code (issue 911)
Deprecate SgmlLinkExtractor (issue 777)
Relocations
Move exporters/__init__.py to exporters.py (issue 1242)
Move base classes to their packages (issue 1218, issue 1233)
Module relocation (issue 1181, issue 1210)
rename SpiderManager to SpiderLoader (issue 1166)
Remove djangoitem (issue 1177)
remove scrapy deploy command (issue 1102)
dissolve contrib_exp (issue 1134)
Deleted bin folder from root, fixes #913 (issue 914)

Remove jsonrpc based webservice (issue 859)

Move Test cases under project root dir (issue 827, issue 841)
Fix backward incompatibility for relocated paths in settings (issue 1267)
Documentation
CrawlerProcess documentation (issue 1190)
Favoring web scraping over screen scraping in the descriptions (issue 1188)
Some improvements for Scrapy tutorial (issue 1180)
Documenting Files Pipeline together with Images Pipeline (issue 1150)
deployment docs tweaks (issue 1164)
Added deployment section covering scrapyd-deploy and shub (issue 1124)
Adding more settings to project template (issue 1073)
some improvements to overview page (issue 1106)
Updated link in docs/topics/architecture.rst (issue 647)
DOC reorder topics (issue 1022)
updating list of Request.meta special keys (issue 1071)
DOC document download_timeout (issue 898)
DOC simplify extension docs (issue 893)
Leaks docs (issue 894)
DOC document from_crawler method for item pipelines (issue 904)
Spider_error doesnt support deferreds (issue 1292)
Corrections & Sphinx related fixes (issue 1220, issue 1219, issue 1196, issue 1172, issue 1171, issue 1169, issue
1160, issue 1154, issue 1127, issue 1112, issue 1105, issue 1041, issue 1082, issue 1033, issue 944, issue 866,
issue 864, issue 796, issue 1260, issue 1271, issue 1293, issue 1298)
Bugfixes
Item multi inheritance fix (issue 353, issue 1228)
ItemLoader.load_item: iterate over copy of fields (issue 722)
Fix Unhandled error in Deferred (RobotsTxtMiddleware) (issue 1131, issue 1197)
Force to read DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT as int (issue 954)
scrapy.utils.misc.load_object should print full traceback (issue 902)
Fix bug for .local host name (issue 878)
Fix for Enabled extensions, middlewares, pipelines info not printed anymore (issue 879)
fix dont_merge_cookies bad behaviour when set to false on meta (issue 846)
Python 3 In Progress Support
disable scrapy.telnet if twisted.conch is not available (issue 1161)
fix Python 3 syntax errors in ajaxcrawl.py (issue 1162)
more python3 compatibility changes for urllib (issue 1121)
assertItemsEqual was renamed to assertCountEqual in Python 3. (issue 1070)

Import unittest.mock if available. (issue 1066)

updated deprecated cgi.parse_qsl to use sixs parse_qsl (issue 909)
Prevent Python 3 port regressions (issue 830)
PY3: use MutableMapping for python 3 (issue 810)
PY3: use six.BytesIO and six.moves.cStringIO (issue 803)
PY3: fix xmlrpclib and email imports (issue 801)
PY3: use six for robotparser and urlparse (issue 800)
PY3: use six.iterkeys, six.iteritems, and tempfile (issue 799)
PY3: fix has_key and use six.moves.configparser (issue 798)
PY3: use six.moves.cPickle (issue 797)
PY3 make it possible to run some tests in Python3 (issue 776)
Tests
remove unnecessary lines from py3-ignores (issue 1243)
Fix remaining warnings from pytest while collecting tests (issue 1206)
Add docs build to travis (issue 1234)
TST dont collect tests from deprecated modules. (issue 1165)
install service_identity package in tests to prevent warnings (issue 1168)
Fix deprecated settings API in tests (issue 1152)
Add test for webclient with POST method and no body given (issue 1089)
py3-ignores.txt supports comments (issue 1044)
modernize some of the asserts (issue 835)
selector.__repr__ test (issue 779)
Code refactoring
CSVFeedSpider cleanup: use iterate_spider_output (issue 1079)
remove unnecessary check from scrapy.utils.spider.iter_spider_output (issue 1078)
Pydispatch pep8 (issue 992)
Removed unused load=False parameter from walk_modules() (issue 871)
For consistency, use job_dir helper in SpiderState extension. (issue 805)
rename sflo local variables to less cryptic log_observer (issue 775)
7.1.18 Scrapy 0.24.6 (2015-04-20)
encode invalid xpath with unicode_escape under PY2 (commit 07cb3e5)

fix IPython shell scope issue and load IPython user config (commit 2c8e573)
Fix small typo in the docs (commit d694019)
Fix small typo (commit f92fa83)
Converted sel.xpath() calls to response.xpath() in Extracting the data (commit c2c6d15)

7.1.19 Scrapy 0.24.5 (2015-02-25)
Support new _getEndpoint Agent signatures on Twisted 15.0.0 (commit 540b9bc)

DOC a couple more references are fixed (commit b4c454b)
DOC fix a reference (commit e3c1260)
t.i.b.ThreadedResolver is now a new-style class (commit 9e13f42)
S3DownloadHandler: fix auth for requests with quoted paths/query params (commit cdb9a0b)
fixed the variable types in mailsender documentation (commit bb3a848)
Reset items_scraped instead of item_count (commit edb07a4)
Tentative attention message about what document to read for contributions (commit 7ee6f7a)
mitmproxy 0.10.1 needs netlib 0.10.1 too (commit 874fcdd)
pin mitmproxy 0.10.1 as >0.11 does not work with tests (commit c6b21f0)
Test the parse command locally instead of against an external url (commit c3a6628)
Patches Twisted issue while closing the connection pool on HTTPDownloadHandler (commit d0bf957)
Updates documentation on dynamic item classes. (commit eeb589a)
Merge pull request #943 from Lazar-T/patch-3 (commit 5fdab02)
typo (commit b0ae199)
pywin32 is required by Twisted. closes #937 (commit 5cb0cfb)
Update install.rst (commit 781286b)
Merge pull request #928 from Lazar-T/patch-1 (commit b415d04)
comma instead of fullstop (commit 627b9ba)
Merge pull request #885 from jsma/patch-1 (commit de909ad)
Update request-response.rst (commit 3f3263d)
SgmlLinkExtractor - fix for parsing <area> tag with Unicode present (commit 49b40f0)
7.1.20 Scrapy 0.24.4 (2014-08-09)
pem file is used by mockserver and required by scrapy bench (commit 5eddc68)
scrapy bench needs scrapy.tests* (commit d6cb999)
7.1.21 Scrapy 0.24.3 (2014-08-09)
no need to waste travis-ci time on py3 for 0.24 (commit 8e080c1)

Update installation docs (commit 1d0c096)
There is a trove classifier for Scrapy framework! (commit 4c701d7)
update other places where w3lib version is mentioned (commit d109c13)
Update w3lib requirement to 1.8.0 (commit 39d2ce5)
Use w3lib.html.replace_entities() (remove_entities() is deprecated) (commit 180d3ad)

set zip_safe=False (commit a51ee8b)

do not ship tests package (commit ee3b371)
scrapy.bat is not needed anymore (commit c3861cf)
Modernize setup.py (commit 362e322)
headers can not handle non-string values (commit 94a5c65)
fix ftp test cases (commit a274a7f)
The sum up of travis-ci builds are taking like 50min to complete (commit ae1e2cc)
Update shell.rst typo (commit e49c96a)
removes weird indentation in the shell results (commit 1ca489d)
improved explanations, clarified blog post as source, added link for XPath string functions in the spec (commit
65c8f05)
renamed UserTimeoutError and ServerTimeouterror #583 (commit 037f6ab)
adding some xpath tips to selectors docs (commit 2d103e0)
fix tests to account for https://github.com/scrapy/w3lib/pull/23 (commit f8d366a)
get_func_args maximum recursion fix #728 (commit 81344ea)
Updated input/ouput processor example according to #560. (commit f7c4ea8)
Fixed Python syntax in tutorial. (commit db59ed9)
Add test case for tunneling proxy (commit f090260)
Bugfix for leaking Proxy-Authorization header to remote host when using tunneling (commit d8793af)
Extract links from XHTML documents with MIME-Type application/xml (commit ed1f376)
Merge pull request #793 from roysc/patch-1 (commit 91a1106)
Fix typo in commands.rst (commit 743e1e2)
better testcase for settings.overrides.setdefault (commit e22daaf)
Using CRLF as line marker according to http 1.1 definition (commit 5ec430b)
7.1.22 Scrapy 0.24.2 (2014-07-08)
Use a mutable mapping to proxy deprecated settings.overrides and settings.defaults attribute (commit e5e8133)
there is not support for python3 yet (commit 3cd6146)
Update python compatible version set to debian packages (commit fa5d76b)
DOC fix formatting in release notes (commit c6a9e20)
7.1.23 Scrapy 0.24.1 (2014-06-27)
Fix deprecated CrawlerSettings and increase backwards compatibility with .defaults attribute (commit 8e3f20a)

7.1.24 Scrapy 0.24.0 (2014-06-26)
Enhancements
Improve Scrapy top-level namespace (issue 494, issue 684)

Add selector shortcuts to responses (issue 554, issue 690)
Add new lxml based LinkExtractor to replace unmantained SgmlLinkExtractor (issue 559, issue 761, issue 763)
Cleanup settings API - part of per-spider settings GSoC project (issue 737)
Add UTF8 encoding header to templates (issue 688, issue 762)
Telnet console now binds to 127.0.0.1 by default (issue 699)
Update debian/ubuntu install instructions (issue 509, issue 549)
Disable smart strings in lxml XPath evaluations (issue 535)
Restore filesystem based cache as default for http cache middleware (issue 541, issue 500, issue 571)
Expose current crawler in Scrapy shell (issue 557)
Improve testsuite comparing CSV and XML exporters (issue 570)
New offsite/filtered and offsite/domains stats (issue 566)
Support process_links as generator in CrawlSpider (issue 555)
Verbose logging and new stats counters for DupeFilter (issue 553)
Add a mimetype parameter to MailSender.send() (issue 602)
Generalize file pipeline log messages (issue 622)
Replace unencodeable codepoints with html entities in SGMLLinkExtractor (issue 565)
Converted SEP documents to rst format (issue 629, issue 630, issue 638, issue 632, issue 636, issue 640, issue
635, issue 634, issue 639, issue 637, issue 631, issue 633, issue 641, issue 642)
Tests and docs for clickdatas nr index in FormRequest (issue 646, issue 645)
Allow to disable a downloader handler just like any other component (issue 650)
Log when a request is discarded after too many redirections (issue 654)
Log error responses if they are not handled by spider callbacks (issue 612, issue 656)
Add content-type check to http compression mw (issue 193, issue 660)
Run pypy tests using latest pypi from ppa (issue 674)
Run test suite using pytest instead of trial (issue 679)
Build docs and check for dead links in tox environment (issue 687)
Make scrapy.version_info a tuple of integers (issue 681, issue 692)
Infer exporters output format from filename extensions (issue 546, issue 659, issue 760)
Support case-insensitive domains in url_is_from_any_domain() (issue 693)
Remove pep8 warnings in project and spider templates (issue 698)
Tests and docs for request_fingerprint function (issue 597)
Update SEP-19 for GSoC project per-spider settings (issue 705)
Set exit code to non-zero when contracts fails (issue 727)

Add a setting to control what class is instanciated as Downloader component (issue 738)
Pass response in item_dropped signal (issue 724)
Improve scrapy check contracts command (issue 733, issue 752)
Document spider.closed() shortcut (issue 719)
Document request_scheduled signal (issue 746)
Add a note about reporting security issues (issue 697)
Add LevelDB http cache storage backend (issue 626, issue 500)
Sort spider list output of scrapy list command (issue 742)
Multiple documentation enhancemens and fixes (issue 575, issue 587, issue 590, issue 596, issue 610, issue 617,
issue 618, issue 627, issue 613, issue 643, issue 654, issue 675, issue 663, issue 711, issue 714)
Bugfixes
Encode unicode URL value when creating Links in RegexLinkExtractor (issue 561)
Ignore None values in ItemLoader processors (issue 556)
Fix link text when there is an inner tag in SGMLLinkExtractor and HtmlParserLinkExtractor (issue 485, issue
574)
Fix wrong checks on subclassing of deprecated classes (issue 581, issue 584)
Handle errors caused by inspect.stack() failures (issue 582)
Fix a reference to unexistent engine attribute (issue 593, issue 594)
Fix dynamic itemclass example usage of type() (issue 603)
Use lucasdemarchi/codespell to fix typos (issue 628)
Fix default value of attrs argument in SgmlLinkExtractor to be tuple (issue 661)
Fix XXE flaw in sitemap reader (issue 676)
Fix engine to support filtered start requests (issue 707)
Fix offsite middleware case on urls with no hostnames (issue 745)
Testsuite doesnt require PIL anymore (issue 585)
7.1.25 Scrapy 0.22.2 (released 2014-02-14)
fix a reference to unexistent engine.slots. closes #593 (commit 13c099a)

downloaderMW doc typo (spiderMW doc copy remnant) (commit 8ae11bf)
Correct typos (commit 1346037)
7.1.26 Scrapy 0.22.1 (released 2014-02-08)
localhost666 can resolve under certain circumstances (commit 2ec2279)

test inspect.stack failure (commit cc3eda3)
Handle cases when inspect.stack() fails (commit 8cb44f9)

Fix wrong checks on subclassing of deprecated classes. closes #581 (commit 46d98d6)
Docs: 4-space indent for final spider example (commit 13846de)
Fix HtmlParserLinkExtractor and tests after #485 merge (commit 368a946)
BaseSgmlLinkExtractor: Fixed the missing space when the link has an inner tag (commit b566388)
BaseSgmlLinkExtractor: Added unit test of a link with an inner tag (commit c1cb418)
BaseSgmlLinkExtractor: Fixed unknown_endtag() so that it only set current_link=None when the end tag match
the opening tag (commit 7e4d627)
Fix tests for Travis-CI build (commit 76c7e20)
replace unencodeable codepoints with html entities. fixes #562 and #285 (commit 5f87b17)
RegexLinkExtractor: encode URL unicode value when creating Links (commit d0ee545)
Updated the tutorial crawl output with latest output. (commit 8da65de)
Updated shell docs with the crawler reference and fixed the actual shell output. (commit 875b9ab)
PEP8 minor edits. (commit f89efaf)
Expose current crawler in the scrapy shell. (commit 5349cec)
Unused re import and PEP8 minor edits. (commit 387f414)
Ignore Nones values when using the ItemLoader. (commit 0632546)
DOC Fixed HTTPCACHE_STORAGE typo in the default value which is now Filesystem instead Dbm. (commit
cde9a8c)
show ubuntu setup instructions as literal code (commit fb5c9c5)
Update Ubuntu installation instructions (commit 70fb105)
Merge pull request #550 from stray-leone/patch-1 (commit 6f70b6a)
modify the version of scrapy ubuntu package (commit 725900d)
fix 0.22.0 release date (commit af0219a)
fix typos in news.rst and remove (not released yet) header (commit b7f58f4)
7.1.27 Scrapy 0.22.0 (released 2014-01-17)
Enhancements
[Backwards incompatible] Switched HTTPCacheMiddleware backend to filesystem (issue 541) To restore old
backend set HTTPCACHE_STORAGE to scrapy.contrib.httpcache.DbmCacheStorage
Proxy https:// urls using CONNECT method (issue 392, issue 397)
Add a middleware to crawl ajax crawleable pages as defined by google (issue 343)
Rename scrapy.spider.BaseSpider to scrapy.spider.Spider (issue 510, issue 519)
Selectors register EXSLT namespaces by default (issue 472)
Unify item loaders similar to selectors renaming (issue 461)
Make RFPDupeFilter class easily subclassable (issue 533)
Improve test coverage and forthcoming Python 3 support (issue 525)

Promote startup info on settings and middleware to INFO level (issue 520)
Support partials in get_func_args util (issue 506, issue:504)
Allow running indiviual tests via tox (issue 503)
Update extensions ignored by link extractors (issue 498)
Add middleware methods to get files/images/thumbs paths (issue 490)
Improve offsite middleware tests (issue 478)
Add a way to skip default Referer header set by RefererMiddleware (issue 475)
Do not send x-gzip in default Accept-Encoding header (issue 469)
Support defining http error handling using settings (issue 466)
Use modern python idioms wherever you find legacies (issue 497)
Improve and correct documentation (issue 527, issue 524, issue 521, issue 517, issue 512, issue 505, issue 502,
issue 489, issue 465, issue 460, issue 425, issue 536)
Fixes
Update Selector class imports in CrawlSpider template (issue 484)

Fix unexistent reference to engine.slots (issue 464)
Do not try to call body_as_unicode() on a non-TextResponse instance (issue 462)
Warn when subclassing XPathItemLoader, previously it only warned on instantiation. (issue 523)
Warn when subclassing XPathSelector, previously it only warned on instantiation. (issue 537)
Multiple fixes to memory stats (issue 531, issue 530, issue 529)
Fix overriding url in FormRequest.from_response() (issue 507)
Fix tests runner under pip 1.5 (issue 513)
Fix logging error when spider name is unicode (issue 479)
7.1.28 Scrapy 0.20.2 (released 2013-12-09)
Update CrawlSpider Template with Selector changes (commit 6d1457d)

fix method name in tutorial. closes GH-480 (commit b4fc359
7.1.29 Scrapy 0.20.1 (released 2013-11-28)
include_package_data is required to build wheels from published sources (commit 5ba1ad5)

process_parallel was leaking the failures on its internal deferreds. closes #458 (commit 419a780)
7.1.30 Scrapy 0.20.0 (released 2013-11-08)
Enhancements
New Selectors API including CSS selectors (issue 395 and issue 426),

Request/Response url/body attributes are now immutable (modifying them had been deprecated for a long time)
ITEM_PIPELINES is now defined as a dict (instead of a list)
Sitemap spider can fetch alternate URLs (issue 360)
Selector.remove_namespaces() now remove namespaces from elements attributes. (issue 416)
Paved the road for Python 3.3+ (issue 435, issue 436, issue 431, issue 452)
New item exporter using native python types with nesting support (issue 366)
Tune HTTP1.1 pool size so it matches concurrency defined by settings (commit b43b5f575)
scrapy.mail.MailSender now can connect over TLS or upgrade using STARTTLS (issue 327)
New FilesPipeline with functionality factored out from ImagesPipeline (issue 370, issue 409)
Recommend Pillow instead of PIL for image handling (issue 317)
Added debian packages for Ubuntu quantal and raring (commit 86230c0)
Mock server (used for tests) can listen for HTTPS requests (issue 410)
Remove multi spider support from multiple core components (issue 422, issue 421, issue 420, issue 419, issue
423, issue 418)
Travis-CI now tests Scrapy changes against development versions of w3lib and queuelib python packages.
Add pypy 2.1 to continuous integration tests (commit ecfa7431)
Pylinted, pep8 and removed old-style exceptions from source (issue 430, issue 432)
Use importlib for parametric imports (issue 445)
Handle a regression introduced in Python 2.7.5 that affects XmlItemExporter (issue 372)
Bugfix crawling shutdown on SIGINT (issue 450)
Do not submit reset type inputs in FormRequest.from_response (commit b326b87)
Do not silence download errors when request errback raises an exception (commit 684cfc0)
Bugfixes
Fix tests under Django 1.6 (commit b6bed44c)

Lot of bugfixes to retry middleware under disconnections using HTTP 1.1 download handler
Fix inconsistencies among Twisted releases (issue 406)
Fix scrapy shell bugs (issue 418, issue 407)
Fix invalid variable name in setup.py (issue 429)
Fix tutorial references (issue 387)
Improve request-response docs (issue 391)
Improve best practices docs (issue 399, issue 400, issue 401, issue 402)
Improve django integration docs (issue 404)
Document bindaddress request meta (commit 37c24e01d7)
Improve Request class documentation (issue 226)

Other
Dropped Python 2.6 support (issue 448)

Add cssselect python package as install dependency
Drop libxml2 and multi selectors backend support, lxml is required from now on.
Minimum Twisted version increased to 10.0.0, dropped Twisted 8.0 support.
Running test suite now requires mock python library (issue 390)
Thanks
Thanks to everyone who contribute to this release!

List of contributors sorted by number of commits:
69 Daniel Graa <dangra@...>
37 Pablo Hoffman <pablo@...>
13 Mikhail Korobov <kmike84@...>
9 Alex Cepoi <alex.cepoi@...>
9 alexanderlukanin13 <alexander.lukanin.13@...>
8 Rolando Espinoza La fuente <darkrho@...>
8 Lukasz Biedrycki <lukasz.biedrycki@...>
6 Nicolas Ramirez <nramirez.uy@...>
3 Paul Tremberth <paul.tremberth@...>
2 Martin Olveyra <molveyra@...>
2 Stefan <misc@...>
2 Rolando Espinoza <darkrho@...>
2 Loren Davie <loren@...>
2 irgmedeiros <irgmedeiros@...>
1 Stefan Koch <taikano@...>
1 Stefan <cct@...>
1 scraperdragon <dragon@...>
1 Kumara Tharmalingam <ktharmal@...>
1 Francesco Piccinno <stack.box@...>
1 Marcos Campal <duendex@...>
1 Dragon Dave <dragon@...>
1 Capi Etheriel <barraponto@...>
1 cacovsky <amarquesferraz@...>
1 Berend Iwema <berend@...>
7.1.31 Scrapy 0.18.4 (released 2013-10-10)
IPython refuses to update the namespace. fix #396 (commit 3d32c4f)

Fix AlreadyCalledError replacing a request in shell command. closes #407 (commit b1d8919)
Fix start_requests laziness and early hangs (commit 89faf52)
7.1.32 Scrapy 0.18.3 (released 2013-10-03)
fix regression on lazy evaluation of start requests (commit 12693a5)

forms: do not submit reset inputs (commit e429f63)
increase unittest timeouts to decrease travis false positive failures (commit 912202e)

backport master fixes to json exporter (commit cfc2d46)

Fix permission and set umask before generating sdist tarball (commit 06149e0)
7.1.33 Scrapy 0.18.2 (released 2013-09-03)
Backport scrapy check command fixes and backward compatible multi crawler process(issue 339)
7.1.34 Scrapy 0.18.1 (released 2013-08-27)
remove extra import added by cherry picked changes (commit d20304e)

fix crawling tests under twisted pre 11.0.0 (commit 1994f38)
py26 can not format zero length fields {} (commit abf756f)
test PotentiaDataLoss errors on unbound responses (commit b15470d)
Treat responses without content-length or Transfer-Encoding as good responses (commit c4bf324)
do no include ResponseFailed if http11 handler is not enabled (commit 6cbe684)
New HTTP client wraps connection losts in ResponseFailed exception. fix #373 (commit 1a20bba)
limit travis-ci build matrix (commit 3b01bb8)
Merge pull request #375 from peterarenot/patch-1 (commit fa766d7)
Fixed so it refers to the correct folder (commit 3283809)
added quantal & raring to support ubuntu releases (commit 1411923)
fix retry middleware which didnt retry certain connection errors after the upgrade to http1 client, closes GH-373
(commit bb35ed0)
fix XmlItemExporter in Python 2.7.4 and 2.7.5 (commit de3e451)
minor updates to 0.18 release notes (commit c45e5f1)
fix contributters list format (commit 0b60031)
7.1.35 Scrapy 0.18.0 (released 2013-08-09)
Lot of improvements to testsuite run using Tox, including a way to test on pypi
Handle GET parameters for AJAX crawleable urls (commit 3fe2a32)
Use lxml recover option to parse sitemaps (issue 347)
Bugfix cookie merging by hostname and not by netloc (issue 352)
Support disabling HttpCompressionMiddleware using a flag setting (issue 359)
Support xml namespaces using iternodes parser in XMLFeedSpider (issue 12)
Support dont_cache request meta flag (issue 19)
Bugfix scrapy.utils.gz.gunzip broken by changes in python 2.7.4 (commit 4dc76e)
Bugfix url encoding on SgmlLinkExtractor (issue 24)
Bugfix TakeFirst processor shouldnt discard zero (0) value (issue 59)
Support nested items in xml exporter (issue 66)

Improve cookies handling performance (issue 77)

Log dupe filtered requests once (issue 105)
Split redirection middleware into status and meta based middlewares (issue 78)
Use HTTP1.1 as default downloader handler (issue 109 and issue 318)
Support xpath form selection on FormRequest.from_response (issue 185)
Bugfix unicode decoding error on SgmlLinkExtractor (issue 199)
Bugfix signal dispatching on pypi interpreter (issue 205)
Improve request delay and concurrency handling (issue 206)
Add RFC2616 cache policy to HttpCacheMiddleware (issue 212)
Allow customization of messages logged by engine (issue 214)
Multiples improvements to DjangoItem (issue 217, issue 218, issue 221)
Extend Scrapy commands using setuptools entry points (issue 260)
Allow spider allowed_domains value to be set/tuple (issue 261)
Support settings.getdict (issue 269)
Simplify internal scrapy.core.scraper slot handling (issue 271)
Added Item.copy (issue 290)
Collect idle downloader slots (issue 297)
Add ftp:// scheme downloader handler (issue 329)
Added downloader benchmark webserver and spider tools Benchmarking
Moved persistent (on disk) queues to a separate project (queuelib) which scrapy now depends on
Add scrapy commands using external libraries (issue 260)
Added --pdb option to scrapy command line tool
Added XPathSelector.remove_namespaces() which allows to remove all namespaces from XML
documents for convenience (to work with namespace-less XPaths). Documented in Selectors.
Several improvements to spider contracts
New default middleware named MetaRefreshMiddldeware that handles meta-refresh html tag redirections,
MetaRefreshMiddldeware and RedirectMiddleware have different priorities to address #62
added from_crawler method to spiders
added system tests with mock server
more improvements to Mac OS compatibility (thanks Alex Cepoi)
several more cleanups to singletons and multi-spider support (thanks Nicolas Ramirez)
support custom download slots
added spider option to shell command.
log overridden settings when scrapy starts
Thanks to everyone who contribute to this release. Here is a list of contributors sorted by number of commits:

130 Pablo Hoffman <pablo@...>

97 Daniel Graa <dangra@...>
20 Nicols Ramrez <nramirez.uy@...>
13 Mikhail Korobov <kmike84@...>
12 Pedro Faustino <pedrobandim@...>
11 Steven Almeroth <sroth77@...>
5 Rolando Espinoza La fuente <darkrho@...>
4 Michal Danilak <mimino.coder@...>
4 Alex Cepoi <alex.cepoi@...>
4 Alexandr N Zamaraev (aka tonal) <tonal@...>
3 paul <paul.tremberth@...>
3 Martin Olveyra <molveyra@...>
3 Jordi Llonch <llonchj@...>
3 arijitchakraborty <myself.arijit@...>
2 Shane Evans <shane.evans@...>
2 joehillen <joehillen@...>
2 Hart <HartSimha@...>
2 Dan <ellisd23@...>
1 Zuhao Wan <wanzuhao@...>
1 whodatninja <blake@...>
1 vkrest <v.krestiannykov@...>
1 tpeng <pengtaoo@...>
1 Tom Mortimer-Jones <tom@...>
1 Rocio Aramberri <roschegel@...>
1 Pedro <pedro@...>
1 notsobad <wangxiaohugg@...>
1 Natan L <kuyanatan.nlao@...>
1 Mark Grey <mark.grey@...>
1 Luan <luanpab@...>
1 Libor Nenadl <libor.nenadal@...>
1 Juan M Uys <opyate@...>
1 Jonas Brunsgaard <jonas.brunsgaard@...>
1 Ilya Baryshev <baryshev@...>
1 Hasnain Lakhani <m.hasnain.lakhani@...>
1 Emanuel Schorsch <emschorsch@...>
1 Chris Tilden <chris.tilden@...>
1 Capi Etheriel <barraponto@...>
1 cacovsky <amarquesferraz@...>
1 Berend Iwema <berend@...>
7.1.36 Scrapy 0.16.5 (released 2013-05-30)
obey request method when scrapy deploy is redirected to a new endpoint (commit 8c4fcee)
fix inaccurate downloader middleware documentation. refs #280 (commit 40667cb)
doc: remove links to diveintopython.org, which is no longer available. closes #246 (commit bd58bfa)
Find form nodes in invalid html5 documents (commit e3d6945)
Fix typo labeling attrs type bool instead of list (commit a274276)
7.1.37 Scrapy 0.16.4 (released 2013-01-23)
fixes spelling errors in documentation (commit 6d2b3aa)

add doc about disabling an extension. refs #132 (commit c90de33)

Fixed error message formatting. log.err() doesnt support cool formatting and when error occurred, the message
was: ERROR: Error processing %(item)s (commit c16150c)
lint and improve images pipeline error logging (commit 56b45fc)
fixed doc typos (commit 243be84)
add documentation topics: Broad Crawls & Common Practies (commit 1fbb715)
fix bug in scrapy parse command when spider is not specified explicitly. closes #209 (commit c72e682)
Update docs/topics/commands.rst (commit 28eac7a)
7.1.38 Scrapy 0.16.3 (released 2012-12-07)
Remove concurrency limitation when using download delays and still ensure inter-request delays are enforced
(commit 487b9b5)
add error details when image pipeline fails (commit 8232569)
improve mac os compatibility (commit 8dcf8aa)
setup.py: use README.rst to populate long_description (commit 7b5310d)
doc: removed obsolete references to ClientForm (commit 80f9bb6)
correct docs for default storage backend (commit 2aa491b)
doc: removed broken proxyhub link from FAQ (commit bdf61c4)
Fixed docs typo in SpiderOpenCloseLogging example (commit 7184094)
7.1.39 Scrapy 0.16.2 (released 2012-11-09)
scrapy contracts: python2.6 compat (commit a4a9199)

scrapy contracts verbose option (commit ec41673)
proper unittest-like output for scrapy contracts (commit 86635e4)
added open_in_browser to debugging doc (commit c9b690d)
removed reference to global scrapy stats from settings doc (commit dd55067)
Fix SpiderState bug in Windows platforms (commit 58998f4)
7.1.40 Scrapy 0.16.1 (released 2012-10-26)
fixed LogStats extension, which got broken after a wrong merge before the 0.16 release (commit 8c780fd)
better backwards compatibility for scrapy.conf.settings (commit 3403089)
extended documentation on how to access crawler stats from extensions (commit c4da0b5)
removed .hgtags (no longer needed now that scrapy uses git) (commit d52c188)
fix dashes under rst headers (commit fa4f7f9)
set release date for 0.16.0 in news (commit e292246)

7.1.41 Scrapy 0.16.0 (released 2012-10-18)
Scrapy changes:
added Spiders Contracts, a mechanism for testing spiders in a formal/reproducible way
added options -o and -t to the runspider command
documented AutoThrottle extension and added to extensions installed by default. You still need to enable it with
major Stats Collection refactoring: removed separation of global/per-spider stats, removed stats-related signals
(stats_spider_opened, etc). Stats are much simpler now, backwards compatibility is kept on the Stats
Collector API and signals.
added process_start_requests() method to spider middlewares
dropped Signals singleton. Signals should now be accesed through the Crawler.signals attribute. See the signals
dropped Signals singleton. Signals should now be accesed through the Crawler.signals attribute. See the signals
dropped Stats Collector singleton. Stats can now be accessed through the Crawler.stats attribute. See the stats
collection documentation for more info.
documented Core API
lxml is now the default selectors backend instead of libxml2
ported FormRequest.from_response() to use lxml instead of ClientForm
removed modules: scrapy.xlib.BeautifulSoup and scrapy.xlib.ClientForm
SitemapSpider: added support for sitemap urls ending in .xml and .xml.gz, even if they advertise a wrong content
type (commit 10ed28b)
StackTraceDump extension: also dump trackref live references (commit fe2ce93)
nested items now fully supported in JSON and JSONLines exporters
added cookiejar Request meta key to support multiple cookie sessions per spider
decoupled encoding detection code to w3lib.encoding, and ported Scrapy code to use that module
dropped support for Python 2.5. See https://blog.scrapinghub.com/2012/02/27/scrapy-0-15-dropping-support-
for-python-2-5/
dropped support for Twisted 2.5
added REFERER_ENABLED setting, to control referer middleware
changed default user agent to: Scrapy/VERSION (+http://scrapy.org)
removed (undocumented) HTMLImageLinkExtractor class from scrapy.contrib.linkextractors.image
removed per-spider settings (to be replaced by instantiating multiple crawler objects)
USER_AGENT spider attribute will no longer work, use user_agent attribute instead
DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT spider attribute will no longer work, use download_timeout attribute instead
removed ENCODING_ALIASES setting, as encoding auto-detection has been moved to the w3lib library
promoted topics-djangoitem to main contrib
LogFormatter method now return dicts(instead of strings) to support lazy formatting (issue 164, commit
dcef7b0)

downloader handlers (DOWNLOAD_HANDLERS setting) now receive settings as the first argument of the con-
structor
replaced memory usage acounting with (more portable) resource module, removed scrapy.utils.memory
module
removed signal: scrapy.mail.mail_sent
removed TRACK_REFS setting, now trackrefs is always enabled
DBM is now the default storage backend for HTTP cache middleware
number of log messages (per level) are now tracked through Scrapy stats (stat name: log_count/LEVEL)
number received responses are now tracked through Scrapy stats (stat name: response_received_count)
removed scrapy.log.started attribute
7.1.42 Scrapy 0.14.4
added precise to supported ubuntu distros (commit b7e46df)

fixed bug in json-rpc webservice reported in https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/scrapy-
users/qgVBmFybNAQ/discussion. also removed no longer supported run command from extras/scrapy-ws.py
(commit 340fbdb)
meta tag attributes for content-type http equiv can be in any order. #123 (commit 0cb68af)
replace import Image by more standard from PIL import Image. closes #88 (commit 4d17048)
return trial status as bin/runtests.sh exit value. #118 (commit b7b2e7f)
7.1.43 Scrapy 0.14.3
forgot to include pydispatch license. #118 (commit fd85f9c)

include egg files used by testsuite in source distribution. #118 (commit c897793)
update docstring in project template to avoid confusion with genspider command, which may be considered as
an advanced feature. refs #107 (commit 2548dcc)
added note to docs/topics/firebug.rst about google directory being shut down (commit 668e352)
dont discard slot when empty, just save in another dict in order to recycle if needed again. (commit 8e9f607)
do not fail handling unicode xpaths in libxml2 backed selectors (commit b830e95)
fixed minor mistake in Request objects documentation (commit bf3c9ee)
fixed minor defect in link extractors documentation (commit ba14f38)
removed some obsolete remaining code related to sqlite support in scrapy (commit 0665175)
7.1.44 Scrapy 0.14.2
move buffer pointing to start of file before computing checksum. refs #92 (commit 6a5bef2)
Compute image checksum before persisting images. closes #92 (commit 9817df1)
remove leaking references in cached failures (commit 673a120)
fixed bug in MemoryUsage extension: get_engine_status() takes exactly 1 argument (0 given) (commit 11133e9)

fixed struct.error on http compression middleware. closes #87 (commit 1423140)

ajax crawling wasnt expanding for unicode urls (commit 0de3fb4)
Catch start_requests iterator errors. refs #83 (commit 454a21d)
Speed-up libxml2 XPathSelector (commit 2fbd662)
updated versioning doc according to recent changes (commit 0a070f5)
scrapyd: fixed documentation link (commit 2b4e4c3)
extras/makedeb.py: no longer obtaining version from git (commit caffe0e)
7.1.45 Scrapy 0.14.1
extras/makedeb.py: no longer obtaining version from git (commit caffe0e)

bumped version to 0.14.1 (commit 6cb9e1c)
fixed reference to tutorial directory (commit 4b86bd6)
doc: removed duplicated callback argument from Request.replace() (commit 1aeccdd)
fixed formatting of scrapyd doc (commit 8bf19e6)
Dump stacks for all running threads and fix engine status dumped by StackTraceDump extension (commit
14a8e6e)
added comment about why we disable ssl on boto images upload (commit 5223575)
SSL handshaking hangs when doing too many parallel connections to S3 (commit 63d583d)
change tutorial to follow changes on dmoz site (commit bcb3198)
Avoid _disconnectedDeferred AttributeError exception in Twisted>=11.1.0 (commit 98f3f87)
allow spider to set autothrottle max concurrency (commit 175a4b5)
7.1.46 Scrapy 0.14
New features and settings
Support for AJAX crawleable urls

New persistent scheduler that stores requests on disk, allowing to suspend and resume crawls (r2737)
added -o option to scrapy crawl, a shortcut for dumping scraped items into a file (or standard output using
-)
Added support for passing custom settings to Scrapyd schedule.json api (r2779, r2783)
New ChunkedTransferMiddleware (enabled by default) to support chunked transfer encoding (r2769)
Add boto 2.0 support for S3 downloader handler (r2763)
Added marshal to formats supported by feed exports (r2744)
In request errbacks, offending requests are now received in failure.request attribute (r2738)
Big downloader refactoring to support per domain/ip concurrency limits (r2732)
CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_SPIDER setting has been deprecated and replaced by:

* CONCURRENT_REQUESTS, CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_DOMAIN ,
check the documentation for more details
Added builtin caching DNS resolver (r2728)
Moved Amazon AWS-related components/extensions (SQS spider queue, SimpleDB stats collector) to a sepa-
rate project: [scaws](https://github.com/scrapinghub/scaws) (r2706, r2714)
Moved spider queues to scrapyd: scrapy.spiderqueue -> scrapyd.spiderqueue (r2708)
Moved sqlite utils to scrapyd: scrapy.utils.sqlite -> scrapyd.sqlite (r2781)
Real support for returning iterators on start_requests() method. The iterator is now consumed during the crawl
when the spider is getting idle (r2704)
Added REDIRECT_ENABLED setting to quickly enable/disable the redirect middleware (r2697)
Added RETRY_ENABLED setting to quickly enable/disable the retry middleware (r2694)
Added CloseSpider exception to manually close spiders (r2691)
Improved encoding detection by adding support for HTML5 meta charset declaration (r2690)
Refactored close spider behavior to wait for all downloads to finish and be processed by spiders, before closing
the spider (r2688)
Added SitemapSpider (see documentation in Spiders page) (r2658)
Added LogStats extension for periodically logging basic stats (like crawled pages and scraped items) (r2657)
Make handling of gzipped responses more robust (#319, r2643). Now Scrapy will try and decompress as much
as possible from a gzipped response, instead of failing with an IOError.
Simplified !MemoryDebugger extension to use stats for dumping memory debugging info (r2639)
Added new command to edit spiders: scrapy edit (r2636) and -e flag to genspider command that uses it
(r2653)
Changed default representation of items to pretty-printed dicts. (r2631). This improves default logging by
making log more readable in the default case, for both Scraped and Dropped lines.
Added spider_error signal (r2628)
Added COOKIES_ENABLED setting (r2625)
Stats are now dumped to Scrapy log (default value of STATS_DUMP setting has been changed to True). This is
to make Scrapy users more aware of Scrapy stats and the data that is collected there.
Added support for dynamically adjusting download delay and maximum concurrent requests (r2599)
Added new DBM HTTP cache storage backend (r2576)
Added listjobs.json API to Scrapyd (r2571)
CsvItemExporter: added join_multivalued parameter (r2578)
Added namespace support to xmliter_lxml (r2552)
Improved cookies middleware by making COOKIES_DEBUG nicer and documenting it (r2579)
Several improvements to Scrapyd and Link extractors

Code rearranged and removed
Merged item passed and item scraped concepts, as they have often proved confusing in the past. This means: (r2630)
original item_scraped signal was removed

original item_passed signal was renamed to item_scraped
old log lines Scraped Item... were removed
old log lines Passed Item... were renamed to Scraped Item... lines and downgraded to
DEBUG level
Reduced Scrapy codebase by striping part of Scrapy code into two new libraries:
w3lib (several functions from scrapy.utils.{http,markup,multipart,response,url},
done in r2584)
scrapely (was scrapy.contrib.ibl, done in r2586)
Removed unused function: scrapy.utils.request.request_info() (r2577)
Removed googledir project from examples/googledir. Theres now a new example project called dirbot available
on github: https://github.com/scrapy/dirbot
Removed support for default field values in Scrapy items (r2616)
Removed experimental crawlspider v2 (r2632)
Removed scheduler middleware to simplify architecture. Duplicates filter is now done in the scheduler itself,
using the same dupe fltering class as before (DUPEFILTER_CLASS setting) (r2640)
Removed support for passing urls to scrapy crawl command (use scrapy parse instead) (r2704)
Removed deprecated Execution Queue (r2704)
Removed (undocumented) spider context extension (from scrapy.contrib.spidercontext) (r2780)
removed CONCURRENT_SPIDERS setting (use scrapyd maxproc instead) (r2789)
Renamed attributes of core components: downloader.sites -> downloader.slots, scraper.sites -> scraper.slots
(r2717, r2718)
Renamed setting CLOSESPIDER_ITEMPASSED to CLOSESPIDER_ITEMCOUNT (r2655). Backwards com-
patibility kept.
7.1.47 Scrapy 0.12
The numbers like #NNN reference tickets in the old issue tracker (Trac) which is no longer available.
New features and improvements
Passed item is now sent in the item argument of the item_passed (#273)
Added verbose option to scrapy version command, useful for bug reports (#298)
HTTP cache now stored by default in the project data dir (#279)
Added project data storage directory (#276, #277)
Documented file structure of Scrapy projects (see command-line tool doc)
New lxml backend for XPath selectors (#147)

Per-spider settings (#245)

Support exit codes to signal errors in Scrapy commands (#248)
Added -c argument to scrapy shell command
Made libxml2 optional (#260)
New deploy command (#261)
Added CLOSESPIDER_PAGECOUNT setting (#253)
Added CLOSESPIDER_ERRORCOUNT setting (#254)
Scrapyd changes
Scrapyd now uses one process per spider

It stores one log file per spider run, and rotate them keeping the lastest 5 logs per spider (by default)
A minimal web ui was added, available at http://localhost:6800 by default
There is now a scrapy server command to start a Scrapyd server of the current project
Changes to settings
added HTTPCACHE_ENABLED setting (False by default) to enable HTTP cache middleware

changed HTTPCACHE_EXPIRATION_SECS semantics: now zero means never expire.
Deprecated/obsoleted functionality
Deprecated runserver command in favor of server command which starts a Scrapyd server. See also:
Scrapyd changes
Deprecated queue command in favor of using Scrapyd schedule.json API. See also: Scrapyd changes
Removed the !LxmlItemLoader (experimental contrib which never graduated to main contrib)
7.1.48 Scrapy 0.10
New Scrapy service called scrapyd for deploying Scrapy crawlers in production (#218) (documentation avail-
able)
Simplified Images pipeline usage which doesnt require subclassing your own images pipeline now (#217)
Scrapy shell now shows the Scrapy log by default (#206)
Refactored execution queue in a common base code and pluggable backends called spider queues (#220)
New persistent spider queue (based on SQLite) (#198), available by default, which allows to start Scrapy in
server mode and then schedule spiders to run.
Added documentation for Scrapy command-line tool and all its available sub-commands. (documentation avail-
able)

Feed exporters with pluggable backends (#197) (documentation available)

Deferred signals (#193)
Added two new methods to item pipeline open_spider(), close_spider() with deferred support (#195)
Support for overriding default request headers per spider (#181)
Replaced default Spider Manager with one with similar functionality but not depending on Twisted Plugins
(#186)
Splitted Debian package into two packages - the library and the service (#187)
Scrapy log refactoring (#188)
New extension for keeping persistent spider contexts among different runs (#203)
Added dont_redirect request.meta key for avoiding redirects (#233)
Added dont_retry request.meta key for avoiding retries (#234)
Command-line tool changes
New scrapy command which replaces the old scrapy-ctl.py (#199) - there is only one global scrapy command
now, instead of one scrapy-ctl.py per project - Added scrapy.bat script for running more conveniently from
Windows
Added bash completion to command-line tool (#210)
Renamed command start to runserver (#209)
API changes
url and body attributes of Request objects are now read-only (#230)
Request.copy() and Request.replace() now also copies their callback and errback attributes
(#231)
Removed UrlFilterMiddleware from scrapy.contrib (already disabled by default)
Offsite middelware doesnt filter out any request coming from a spider that doesnt have a allowed_domains
attribute (#225)
Removed Spider Manager load() method. Now spiders are loaded in the constructor itself.
Changes to Scrapy Manager (now called Crawler):
scrapy.core.manager.ScrapyManager class renamed to scrapy.crawler.Crawler
scrapy.core.manager.scrapymanager singleton moved to
scrapy.project.crawler
Moved module: scrapy.contrib.spidermanager to scrapy.spidermanager
Spider Manager singleton moved from scrapy.spider.spiders to the spiders attribute of
scrapy.project.crawler singleton.
moved Stats Collector classes: (#204)
scrapy.stats.collector.StatsCollector to scrapy.statscol.StatsCollector
scrapy.stats.collector.SimpledbStatsCollector to
scrapy.contrib.statscol.SimpledbStatsCollector

default per-command settings are now specified in the default_settings attribute of command object
class (#201)
changed arguments of Item pipeline process_item() method from (spider, item) to (item, spider)
backwards compatibility kept (with deprecation warning)

moved scrapy.core.signals module to scrapy.signals
moved scrapy.core.exceptions module to scrapy.exceptions
added handles_request() class method to BaseSpider
dropped scrapy.log.exc() function (use scrapy.log.err() instead)
dropped component argument of scrapy.log.msg() function
dropped scrapy.log.log_level attribute
Added from_settings() class methods to Spider Manager, and Item Pipeline Manager
Changes to settings
Added HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_SCHEMES setting to ignore certain schemes on !HttpCacheMiddleware (#225)

Added SPIDER_QUEUE_CLASS setting which defines the spider queue to use (#220)
Added KEEP_ALIVE setting (#220)
Removed SERVICE_QUEUE setting (#220)
Removed COMMANDS_SETTINGS_MODULE setting (#201)
Renamed REQUEST_HANDLERS to DOWNLOAD_HANDLERS and make download handlers classes (instead of
functions)
7.1.49 Scrapy 0.9
Added SMTP-AUTH support to scrapy.mail

New settings added: MAIL_USER, MAIL_PASS (r2065 | #149)
Added new scrapy-ctl view command - To view URL in the browser, as seen by Scrapy (r2039)
Added web service for controlling Scrapy process (this also deprecates the web console. (r2053 | #167)
Support for running Scrapy as a service, for production systems (r1988, r2054, r2055, r2056, r2057 | #168)
Added wrapper induction library (documentation only available in source code for now). (r2011)
Simplified and improved response encoding support (r1961, r1969)
Added LOG_ENCODING setting (r1956, documentation available)
Added RANDOMIZE_DOWNLOAD_DELAY setting (enabled by default) (r1923, doc available)

MailSender is no longer IO-blocking (r1955 | #146)

Linkextractors and new Crawlspider now handle relative base tag urls (r1960 | #148)
Several improvements to Item Loaders and processors (r2022, r2023, r2024, r2025, r2026, r2027, r2028, r2029,
r2030)
Added support for adding variables to telnet console (r2047 | #165)
Support for requests without callbacks (r2050 | #166)
API changes
Change Spider.domain_name to Spider.name (SEP-012, r1975)

Response.encoding is now the detected encoding (r1961)
HttpErrorMiddleware now returns None or raises an exception (r2006 | #157)
scrapy.command modules relocation (r2035, r2036, r2037)
Added ExecutionQueue for feeding spiders to scrape (r2034)
Removed ExecutionEngine singleton (r2039)
Ported S3ImagesStore (images pipeline) to use boto and threads (r2033)
Moved module: scrapy.management.telnet to scrapy.telnet (r2047)
Changes to default settings
Changed default SCHEDULER_ORDER to DFO (r1939)
7.1.50 Scrapy 0.8
New features
Added DEFAULT_RESPONSE_ENCODING setting (r1809)

Added dont_click argument to FormRequest.from_response() method (r1813, r1816)
Added clickdata argument to FormRequest.from_response() method (r1802, r1803)
Added support for HTTP proxies (HttpProxyMiddleware) (r1781, r1785)
Offsite spider middleware now logs messages when filtering out requests (r1841)
Backwards-incompatible changes
Changed scrapy.utils.response.get_meta_refresh() signature (r1804)

Removed deprecated scrapy.item.ScrapedItem class - use scrapy.item.Item instead (r1838)
Removed deprecated scrapy.xpath module - use scrapy.selector instead. (r1836)
Removed deprecated core.signals.domain_open signal - use core.signals.domain_opened
instead (r1822)

log.msg() now receives a spider argument (r1822)

Old domain argument has been deprecated and will be removed in 0.9. For spiders, you should
always use the spider argument and pass spider references. If you really want to pass a string, use
the component argument instead.
Changed core signals domain_opened, domain_closed, domain_idle
Changed Item pipeline to use spiders instead of domains
The domain argument of process_item() item pipeline method was changed to spider, the
new signature is: process_item(spider, item) (r1827 | #105)
To quickly port your code (to work with Scrapy 0.8) just use spider.domain_name where you
previously used domain.
Changed Stats API to use spiders instead of domains (r1849 | #113)
StatsCollector was changed to receive spider references (instead of domains) in its methods
(set_value, inc_value, etc).
added StatsCollector.iter_spider_stats() method
removed StatsCollector.list_domains() method
Also, Stats signals were renamed and now pass around spider references (instead of domains). Heres
a summary of the changes:
To quickly port your code (to work with Scrapy 0.8) just use spider.domain_name where you
previously used domain. spider_stats contains exactly the same data as domain_stats.
CloseDomain extension moved to scrapy.contrib.closespider.CloseSpider (r1833)
Its settings were also renamed:
* CLOSEDOMAIN_TIMEOUT to CLOSESPIDER_TIMEOUT
* CLOSEDOMAIN_ITEMCOUNT to CLOSESPIDER_ITEMCOUNT
Removed deprecated SCRAPYSETTINGS_MODULE environment variable - use
SCRAPY_SETTINGS_MODULE instead (r1840)
Renamed setting: REQUESTS_PER_DOMAIN to CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_SPIDER (r1830, r1844)
Renamed setting: CONCURRENT_DOMAINS to CONCURRENT_SPIDERS (r1830)
Refactored HTTP Cache middleware
HTTP Cache middleware has been heavilty refactored, retaining the same functionality except for the domain
sectorization which was removed. (r1843 )
Renamed exception: DontCloseDomain to DontCloseSpider (r1859 | #120)
Renamed extension: DelayedCloseDomain to SpiderCloseDelay (r1861 | #121)
Removed obsolete scrapy.utils.markup.remove_escape_chars function - use
scrapy.utils.markup.replace_escape_chars instead (r1865)
7.1.51 Scrapy 0.7
First release of Scrapy.

7.2 Contributing to Scrapy
Important: Double check you are reading the most recent version of this document at
http://doc.scrapy.org/en/master/contributing.html
There are many ways to contribute to Scrapy. Here are some of them:
Blog about Scrapy. Tell the world how youre using Scrapy. This will help newcomers with more examples and
the Scrapy project to increase its visibility.
Report bugs and request features in the issue tracker, trying to follow the guidelines detailed in Reporting bugs
below.
Submit patches for new functionality and/or bug fixes. Please read Writing patches and Submitting patches
below for details on how to write and submit a patch.
Join the scrapy-users mailing list and share your ideas on how to improve Scrapy. Were always open to sugges-
tions.
7.2.1 Reporting bugs
Note: Please report security issues only to [email protected]. This is a private list only open to
trusted Scrapy developers, and its archives are not public.
Well-written bug reports are very helpful, so keep in mind the following guidelines when reporting a new bug.
check the FAQ first to see if your issue is addressed in a well-known question
check the open issues to see if it has already been reported. If it has, dont dismiss the report but check the ticket
history and comments, you may find additional useful information to contribute.
search the scrapy-users list to see if it has been discussed there, or if youre not sure if what youre seeing is a
bug. You can also ask in the #scrapy IRC channel.
write complete, reproducible, specific bug reports. The smaller the test case, the better. Remember that
other developers wont have your project to reproduce the bug, so please include all relevant files required to
reproduce it. See for example StackOverflows guide on creating a Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable example
exhibiting the issue.
include the output of scrapy version -v so developers working on your bug know exactly which version
and platform it occurred on, which is often very helpful for reproducing it, or knowing if it was already fixed.
7.2.2 Writing patches
The better written a patch is, the higher chance that itll get accepted and the sooner that will be merged.
Well-written patches should:
contain the minimum amount of code required for the specific change. Small patches are easier to review and
merge. So, if youre doing more than one change (or bug fix), please consider submitting one patch per change.
Do not collapse multiple changes into a single patch. For big changes consider using a patch queue.
pass all unit-tests. See Running tests below.
include one (or more) test cases that check the bug fixed or the new functionality added. See Writing tests below.

if youre adding or changing a public (documented) API, please include the documentation changes in the same
patch. See Documentation policies below.
7.2.3 Submitting patches
The best way to submit a patch is to issue a pull request on GitHub, optionally creating a new issue first.
Remember to explain what was fixed or the new functionality (what it is, why its needed, etc). The more info you
include, the easier will be for core developers to understand and accept your patch.
You can also discuss the new functionality (or bug fix) before creating the patch, but its always good to have a patch
ready to illustrate your arguments and show that you have put some additional thought into the subject. A good starting
point is to send a pull request on GitHub. It can be simple enough to illustrate your idea, and leave documentation/tests
for later, after the idea has been validated and proven useful. Alternatively, you can send an email to scrapy-users to
discuss your idea first. When writing GitHub pull requests, try to keep titles short but descriptive. E.g. For bug #411:
Scrapy hangs if an exception raises in start_requests prefer Fix hanging when exception occurs in start_requests
(#411) instead of Fix for #411. Complete titles make it easy to skim through the issue tracker.
Finally, try to keep aesthetic changes (PEP 8 compliance, unused imports removal, etc) in separate commits than
functional changes. This will make pull requests easier to review and more likely to get merged.
7.2.4 Coding style
Please follow these coding conventions when writing code for inclusion in Scrapy:
Unless otherwise specified, follow PEP 8.
Its OK to use lines longer than 80 chars if it improves the code readability.
Dont put your name in the code you contribute. Our policy is to keep the contributors name in the AUTHORS
file distributed with Scrapy.
7.2.5 Scrapy Contrib
Scrapy contrib shares a similar rationale as Django contrib, which is explained in this post. If you are working on a
new functionality, please follow that rationale to decide whether it should be a Scrapy contrib. If unsure, you can ask
in scrapy-users.
7.2.6 Documentation policies
Dont use docstrings for documenting classes, or methods which are already documented in the official (sphinx)
documentation. For example, the ItemLoader.add_value() method should be documented in the sphinx
documentation, not its docstring.
Do use docstrings for documenting functions not present in the official (sphinx) documentation, such as func-
tions from scrapy.utils package and its sub-modules.
7.2.7 Tests
Tests are implemented using the Twisted unit-testing framework, running tests requires tox.
7.2. Contributing to Scrapy 241

Running tests
Make sure you have a recent enough tox installation:

tox --version
If your version is older than 1.7.0, please update it first:
pip install -U tox
To run all tests go to the root directory of Scrapy source code and run:
tox
To run a specific test (say tests/test_loader.py) use:
tox -- tests/test_loader.py
To see coverage report install coverage (pip install coverage) and run:
coverage report
see output of coverage --help for more options like html or xml report.
Writing tests
All functionality (including new features and bug fixes) must include a test case to check that it works as expected, so
please include tests for your patches if you want them to get accepted sooner.
Scrapy uses unit-tests, which are located in the tests/ directory. Their module name typically resembles the full path
of the module theyre testing. For example, the item loaders code is in:
scrapy.loader
And their unit-tests are in:

tests/test_loader.py
7.3 Versioning and API Stability
7.3.1 Versioning
There are 3 numbers in a Scrapy version: A.B.C

A is the major version. This will rarely change and will signify very large changes.
B is the release number. This will include many changes including features and things that possibly break
backwards compatibility, although we strive to keep theses cases at a minimum.
C is the bugfix release number.
Backward-incompatibilities are explicitly mentioned in the release notes, and may require special attention before
upgrading.
Development releases do not follow 3-numbers version and are generally released as dev suffixed versions, e.g.
1.3dev.
Note: With Scrapy 0.* series, Scrapy used odd-numbered versions for development releases. This is not the case
anymore from Scrapy 1.0 onwards.

Starting with Scrapy 1.0, all releases should be considered production-ready.
For example:
1.1.1 is the first bugfix release of the 1.1 series (safe to use in production)
7.3.2 API Stability
API stability was one of the major goals for the 1.0 release.
Methods or functions that start with a single dash (_) are private and should never be relied as stable.
Also, keep in mind that stable doesnt mean complete: stable APIs could grow new methods or functionality but the
existing methods should keep working the same way.
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.
7.3. Versioning and API Stability 243


Python Module Index
s scrapy.item, 51
scrapy.contracts, 131 scrapy.linkextractors, 87
scrapy.contracts.default, 130 scrapy.linkextractors.lxmlhtml, 87
scrapy.crawler, 183 scrapy.loader, 55
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares, 163 scrapy.loader.processors, 63
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.ajaxcrawl, scrapy.mail, 116
173 scrapy.pipelines.files, 150
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.cookies, scrapy.pipelines.images, 151
164 scrapy.selector, 48
scrapy.settings, 185
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.defaultheaders,
165 scrapy.signalmanager, 189
scrapy.signals, 191
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.downloadtimeout,
166 scrapy.spidermiddlewares, 174
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpauth, scrapy.spidermiddlewares.depth, 176
166 scrapy.spidermiddlewares.httperror, 176
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpcache, scrapy.spidermiddlewares.offsite, 177
166 scrapy.spidermiddlewares.referer, 177
scrapy.spidermiddlewares.urllength, 177
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpcompression,
170 scrapy.spiders, 30
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpproxy, scrapy.statscollectors, 116
170 scrapy.utils.log, 114
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.redirect, scrapy.utils.trackref, 144
171
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.retry, 172
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.robotstxt,
173
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.stats, 173
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.useragent,
173
scrapy.exceptions, 109
scrapy.exporters, 194
scrapy.extensions.closespider, 181
scrapy.extensions.corestats, 180
scrapy.extensions.debug, 182
scrapy.extensions.logstats, 180
scrapy.extensions.memdebug, 181
scrapy.extensions.memusage, 180
scrapy.extensions.statsmailer, 182
scrapy.extensions.telnet, 119
scrapy.http, 77
245
246 Python Module Index

Index
Symbols body (scrapy.http.Request attribute), 79

__nonzero__() (scrapy.selector.Selector method), 49 body (scrapy.http.Response attribute), 84
__nonzero__() (scrapy.selector.SelectorList method), 50 body_as_unicode() (scrapy.http.TextResponse method),
86
A BOT_NAME
setting, 91
adapt_response() (scrapy.spiders.XMLFeedSpider
method), 36 C
add_css() (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader method), 60
add_value() (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader method), 59 check
add_xpath() (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader method), 59 command, 24
adjust_request_args() (scrapy.contracts.Contract method), clear_stats() (scrapy.statscollectors.StatsCollector
131 method), 190
AJAXCRAWL_ENABLED close_spider(), 69
setting, 173 close_spider() (scrapy.statscollectors.StatsCollector
AjaxCrawlMiddleware (class in method), 190
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.ajaxcrawl), closed() (scrapy.spiders.Spider method), 32
173 CloseSpider, 109
allowed_domains (scrapy.spiders.Spider attribute), 30 CLOSESPIDER_ERRORCOUNT
AUTOTHROTTLE_DEBUG setting, 181
setting, 155 CLOSESPIDER_ITEMCOUNT
AUTOTHROTTLE_ENABLED setting, 181
setting, 154 CLOSESPIDER_PAGECOUNT
AUTOTHROTTLE_MAX_DELAY setting, 181
setting, 154 CLOSESPIDER_TIMEOUT
AUTOTHROTTLE_START_DELAY setting, 181
setting, 154 command
AUTOTHROTTLE_TARGET_CONCURRENCY bench, 28
setting, 154 check, 24
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID crawl, 24
setting, 91 edit, 25
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY fetch, 25
setting, 91 genspider, 24
list, 25
B parse, 27
runspider, 28
BaseItemExporter (class in scrapy.exporters), 196 settings, 28
BaseSettings (class in scrapy.settings), 186 shell, 26
bench startproject, 23
command, 28 version, 28
bindaddress view, 26
reqmeta, 82 COMMANDS_MODULE
247
setting, 29 D
Compose (class in scrapy.loader.processors), 63 default_input_processor (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader at-
COMPRESSION_ENABLED tribute), 61
setting, 170 DEFAULT_ITEM_CLASS
CONCURRENT_ITEMS setting, 92
setting, 91 default_item_class (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader attribute),
CONCURRENT_REQUESTS 61
setting, 91 default_output_processor (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader at-
CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_DOMAIN tribute), 61
setting, 91 DEFAULT_REQUEST_HEADERS
CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_IP setting, 92
setting, 91 default_selector_class (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader at-
configure_logging() (in module scrapy.utils.log), 114 tribute), 61
connect() (scrapy.signalmanager.SignalManager DefaultHeadersMiddleware (class in
method), 189 scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.defaultheaders),
context (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader attribute), 61 165
Contract (class in scrapy.contracts), 131 delimiter (scrapy.spiders.CSVFeedSpider attribute), 37
cookiejar DEPTH_LIMIT
reqmeta, 164 setting, 92
COOKIES_DEBUG DEPTH_PRIORITY
setting, 165 setting, 92
COOKIES_ENABLED DEPTH_STATS
CookiesMiddleware (class in DEPTH_STATS_VERBOSE
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.cookies), setting, 93
164 DepthMiddleware (class in
copy() (scrapy.http.Request method), 79 scrapy.spidermiddlewares.depth), 176
copy() (scrapy.http.Response method), 85 disconnect() (scrapy.signalmanager.SignalManager
copy() (scrapy.settings.BaseSettings method), 186 method), 189
copy_to_dict() (scrapy.settings.BaseSettings method), disconnect_all() (scrapy.signalmanager.SignalManager
186 method), 189
CoreStats (class in scrapy.extensions.corestats), 180 DNS_TIMEOUT
crawl setting, 93
command, 24 DNSCACHE_ENABLED
crawl() (scrapy.crawler.Crawler method), 184 setting, 93
crawl() (scrapy.crawler.CrawlerProcess method), 185 DNSCACHE_SIZE
crawl() (scrapy.crawler.CrawlerRunner method), 184 setting, 93
Crawler (class in scrapy.crawler), 183 dont_cache
crawler (scrapy.spiders.Spider attribute), 30 reqmeta, 166
CrawlerProcess (class in scrapy.crawler), 184 dont_obey_robotstxt
CrawlerRunner (class in scrapy.crawler), 184 reqmeta, 173
crawlers (scrapy.crawler.CrawlerProcess attribute), 185 dont_redirect
crawlers (scrapy.crawler.CrawlerRunner attribute), 184 reqmeta, 171
CrawlSpider (class in scrapy.spiders), 34 dont_retry
create_crawler() (scrapy.crawler.CrawlerProcess reqmeta, 172
method), 185 DOWNLOAD_DELAY
create_crawler() (scrapy.crawler.CrawlerRunner method), setting, 95
184 DOWNLOAD_HANDLERS
css() (scrapy.http.TextResponse method), 86 setting, 95
css() (scrapy.selector.Selector method), 49 DOWNLOAD_HANDLERS_BASE
css() (scrapy.selector.SelectorList method), 50 setting, 95
CSVFeedSpider (class in scrapy.spiders), 37 download_latency
CsvItemExporter (class in scrapy.exporters), 198 reqmeta, 82
custom_settings (scrapy.spiders.Spider attribute), 30 DOWNLOAD_MAXSIZE
248 Index
setting, 96 export_empty_fields (scrapy.exporters.BaseItemExporter

download_maxsize attribute), 197
reqmeta, 96 export_item() (scrapy.exporters.BaseItemExporter
DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT method), 196
setting, 96 EXTENSIONS
download_timeout setting, 97
reqmeta, 82 extensions (scrapy.crawler.Crawler attribute), 183
DOWNLOAD_WARNSIZE EXTENSIONS_BASE
DOWNLOADER extract() (scrapy.selector.Selector method), 49
setting, 93 extract() (scrapy.selector.SelectorList method), 50
setting, 94 F
DOWNLOADER_CLIENTCONTEXTFACTORY FEED_EXPORT_ENCODING
DOWNLOADER_HTTPCLIENTFACTORY FEED_EXPORT_FIELDS
DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES FEED_EXPORTERS
DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES_BASE FEED_EXPORTERS_BASE
DOWNLOADER_STATS FEED_FORMAT
DownloaderMiddleware (class in FEED_STORAGES
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares), 163 setting, 76
DownloaderStats (class in FEED_STORAGES_BASE
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.stats), 173 setting, 76
DownloadTimeoutMiddleware (class in FEED_STORE_EMPTY
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.downloadtimeout), setting, 76
166 FEED_TEMPDIR
DropItem, 109 setting, 97
DummyStatsCollector (class in scrapy.statscollectors), FEED_URI
116 setting, 75
DUPEFILTER_CLASS fetch
setting, 96 command, 25
DUPEFILTER_DEBUG Field (class in scrapy.item), 55
setting, 97 fields (scrapy.item.Item attribute), 54
fields_to_export (scrapy.exporters.BaseItemExporter at-
E tribute), 197
edit FILES_EXPIRES
command, 25 setting, 149
EDITOR FILES_RESULT_FIELD
encoding (scrapy.exporters.BaseItemExporter attribute), FILES_STORE
197 setting, 147
encoding (scrapy.http.TextResponse attribute), 86 FILES_STORE_S3_ACL
engine (scrapy.crawler.Crawler attribute), 183 setting, 148
engine_started FILES_URLS_FIELD
signal, 191 setting, 148
engine_started() (in module scrapy.signals), 191 FilesPipeline (class in scrapy.pipelines.files), 150
engine_stopped find_by_request() (scrapy.loader.SpiderLoader method),
signal, 191 189
engine_stopped() (in module scrapy.signals), 191 finish_exporting() (scrapy.exporters.BaseItemExporter
method), 196
Index 249
flags (scrapy.http.Response attribute), 85 HtmlResponse (class in scrapy.http), 86

FormRequest (class in scrapy.http), 82 HttpAuthMiddleware (class in
freeze() (scrapy.settings.BaseSettings method), 186 scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpauth),
from_crawler(), 69 166
from_crawler() (scrapy.spiders.Spider method), 31 HTTPCACHE_ALWAYS_STORE
from_response() (scrapy.http.FormRequest class setting, 169
method), 82 HTTPCACHE_DBM_MODULE
from_settings() (scrapy.loader.SpiderLoader method), setting, 169
189 HTTPCACHE_DIR
from_settings() (scrapy.mail.MailSender class method), setting, 169
117 HTTPCACHE_ENABLED
frozencopy() (scrapy.settings.BaseSettings method), 186 setting, 168
HTTPCACHE_EXPIRATION_SECS
G setting, 169
genspider HTTPCACHE_GZIP
command, 24 setting, 169
get() (scrapy.settings.BaseSettings method), 187 HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_HTTP_CODES
get_collected_values() (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader setting, 169
method), 61 HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_MISSING
get_css() (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader method), 60 setting, 169
get_input_processor() (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_RESPONSE_CACHE_CONTROLS
method), 61 setting, 170
get_media_requests() (scrapy.pipelines.files.FilesPipeline HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_SCHEMES
get_media_requests() (scrapy.pipelines.images.ImagesPipeline HTTPCACHE_POLICY
get_oldest() (in module scrapy.utils.trackref), 145 HTTPCACHE_STORAGE
get_output_processor() (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader setting, 169
method), 61 HttpCacheMiddleware (class in
get_output_value() (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader method), scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpcache),
61 166
get_settings_priority() (in module scrapy.settings), 186 HttpCompressionMiddleware (class in
get_stats() (scrapy.statscollectors.StatsCollector method), scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpcompression),
190 170
get_value() (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader method), 59 HTTPERROR_ALLOW_ALL
get_value() (scrapy.statscollectors.StatsCollector setting, 177
method), 190 HTTPERROR_ALLOWED_CODES
get_xpath() (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader method), 59 setting, 177
getbool() (scrapy.settings.BaseSettings method), 187 HttpErrorMiddleware (class in
getdict() (scrapy.settings.BaseSettings method), 187 scrapy.spidermiddlewares.httperror), 176
getfloat() (scrapy.settings.BaseSettings method), 187 HTTPPROXY_AUTH_ENCODING
getint() (scrapy.settings.BaseSettings method), 187 setting, 173
getlist() (scrapy.settings.BaseSettings method), 187 HttpProxyMiddleware (class in
getpriority() (scrapy.settings.BaseSettings method), 187 scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpproxy),
getwithbase() (scrapy.settings.BaseSettings method), 188 170
H I
handle_httpstatus_all Identity (class in scrapy.loader.processors), 63
reqmeta, 176 IgnoreRequest, 110
handle_httpstatus_list IMAGES_EXPIRES
reqmeta, 176 setting, 149
headers (scrapy.http.Request attribute), 79 IMAGES_MIN_HEIGHT
headers (scrapy.http.Response attribute), 84 setting, 150
headers (scrapy.spiders.CSVFeedSpider attribute), 37 IMAGES_MIN_WIDTH
250 Index

IMAGES_RESULT_FIELD LOG_FILE
IMAGES_STORE LOG_FORMAT
IMAGES_STORE_S3_ACL LOG_LEVEL
IMAGES_THUMBS LOG_SHORT_NAMES
IMAGES_URLS_FIELD LOG_STDOUT
ImagesPipeline (class in scrapy.pipelines.images), 151 logger (scrapy.spiders.Spider attribute), 30
inc_value() (scrapy.statscollectors.StatsCollector LogStats (class in scrapy.extensions.logstats), 180
method), 190 LxmlLinkExtractor (class in
Item (class in scrapy.item), 54 scrapy.linkextractors.lxmlhtml), 87
item (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader attribute), 61
item_completed() (scrapy.pipelines.files.FilesPipeline M
method), 151 MAIL_FROM
item_completed() (scrapy.pipelines.images.ImagesPipeline setting, 118
method), 151 MAIL_HOST
item_dropped setting, 118
signal, 192 MAIL_PASS
item_dropped() (in module scrapy.signals), 192 setting, 118
ITEM_PIPELINES MAIL_PORT
ITEM_PIPELINES_BASE MAIL_SSL
item_scraped MAIL_TLS
item_scraped() (in module scrapy.signals), 192 MAIL_USER
ItemLoader (class in scrapy.loader), 58 setting, 118
iter_all() (in module scrapy.utils.trackref), 145 MailSender (class in scrapy.mail), 117
iterator (scrapy.spiders.XMLFeedSpider attribute), 35 make_requests_from_url() (scrapy.spiders.Spider
itertag (scrapy.spiders.XMLFeedSpider attribute), 36 method), 31
MapCompose (class in scrapy.loader.processors), 64
J max_value() (scrapy.statscollectors.StatsCollector
Join (class in scrapy.loader.processors), 63 method), 190
join() (scrapy.crawler.CrawlerProcess method), 185 maxpriority() (scrapy.settings.BaseSettings method), 188
join() (scrapy.crawler.CrawlerRunner method), 184 MEMDEBUG_ENABLED
JsonItemExporter (class in scrapy.exporters), 199 setting, 99
JsonLinesItemExporter (class in scrapy.exporters), 199 MEMDEBUG_NOTIFY
setting, 99
L MemoryStatsCollector (class in scrapy.statscollectors),
list 116
command, 25 MEMUSAGE_CHECK_INTERVAL_SECONDS
list() (scrapy.loader.SpiderLoader method), 189 setting, 100
load() (scrapy.loader.SpiderLoader method), 189 MEMUSAGE_ENABLED
load_item() (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader method), 60 setting, 99
log() (scrapy.spiders.Spider method), 31 MEMUSAGE_LIMIT_MB
LOG_DATEFORMAT setting, 99
setting, 98 MEMUSAGE_NOTIFY_MAIL
LOG_ENABLED setting, 100
setting, 98 MEMUSAGE_REPORT
LOG_ENCODING setting, 100
Index 251
MEMUSAGE_WARNING_MB process_response() (scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.DownloaderMiddlewar

setting, 100 method), 163
meta (scrapy.http.Request attribute), 79 process_results() (scrapy.spiders.XMLFeedSpider
meta (scrapy.http.Response attribute), 85 method), 36
METAREFRESH_ENABLED process_spider_exception()
setting, 172 (scrapy.spidermiddlewares.SpiderMiddleware
METAREFRESH_MAXDELAY method), 175
setting, 172 process_spider_input() (scrapy.spidermiddlewares.SpiderMiddleware
MetaRefreshMiddleware (class in method), 174
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.redirect), process_spider_output() (scrapy.spidermiddlewares.SpiderMiddleware
171 method), 175
method (scrapy.http.Request attribute), 79 process_start_requests() (scrapy.spidermiddlewares.SpiderMiddleware
min_value() (scrapy.statscollectors.StatsCollector method), 175
method), 190 proxy
reqmeta, 170
N Python Enhancement Proposals
name (scrapy.spiders.Spider attribute), 30 PEP 8, 241
namespaces (scrapy.spiders.XMLFeedSpider attribute),
36 Q
nested_css() (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader method), 60 quotechar (scrapy.spiders.CSVFeedSpider attribute), 37
nested_xpath() (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader method), 60
NEWSPIDER_MODULE R
setting, 100 RANDOMIZE_DOWNLOAD_DELAY
NotConfigured, 110 setting, 101
NotSupported, 110 re() (scrapy.selector.Selector method), 49
re() (scrapy.selector.SelectorList method), 50
O REACTOR_THREADPOOL_MAXSIZE
object_ref (class in scrapy.utils.trackref), 144 setting, 101
OffsiteMiddleware (class in REDIRECT_ENABLED
scrapy.spidermiddlewares.offsite), 177 setting, 171
open_spider(), 69 REDIRECT_MAX_TIMES
open_spider() (scrapy.statscollectors.StatsCollector setting, 101, 171
method), 190 REDIRECT_PRIORITY_ADJUST
setting, 101
P redirect_urls
parse reqmeta, 171
command, 27 RedirectMiddleware (class in
parse() (scrapy.spiders.Spider method), 31 scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.redirect),
parse_node() (scrapy.spiders.XMLFeedSpider method), 171
36 REFERER_ENABLED
parse_row() (scrapy.spiders.CSVFeedSpider method), 37 setting, 177
parse_start_url() (scrapy.spiders.CrawlSpider method), RefererMiddleware (class in
34 scrapy.spidermiddlewares.referer), 177
PickleItemExporter (class in scrapy.exporters), 198 register_namespace() (scrapy.selector.Selector method),
post_process() (scrapy.contracts.Contract method), 131 49
PprintItemExporter (class in scrapy.exporters), 199 remove_namespaces() (scrapy.selector.Selector method),
pre_process() (scrapy.contracts.Contract method), 131 49
print_live_refs() (in module scrapy.utils.trackref), 145 replace() (scrapy.http.Request method), 79
replace() (scrapy.http.Response method), 85
process_exception() (scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.DownloaderMiddleware
method), 164 replace_css() (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader method), 60
process_item(), 69 replace_value() (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader method), 59
replace_xpath() (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader method), 60
process_request() (scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.DownloaderMiddleware
method), 163 reqmeta
bindaddress, 82
252 Index
cookiejar, 164 setting, 102

dont_cache, 166 SCHEDULER_MEMORY_QUEUE
dont_obey_robotstxt, 173 setting, 102
dont_redirect, 171 SCHEDULER_PRIORITY_QUEUE
dont_retry, 172 setting, 102
download_latency, 82 ScrapesContract (class in scrapy.contracts.default), 130
download_maxsize, 96 scrapy.contracts (module), 131
download_timeout, 82 scrapy.contracts.default (module), 130
handle_httpstatus_all, 176 scrapy.crawler (module), 183
handle_httpstatus_list, 176 scrapy.downloadermiddlewares (module), 163
proxy, 170 scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.ajaxcrawl (module), 173
redirect_urls, 171 scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.cookies (module), 164
Request (class in scrapy.http), 78 scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.defaultheaders (module),
request (scrapy.http.Response attribute), 85 165
request_dropped scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.downloadtimeout (mod-
signal, 193 ule), 166
request_dropped() (in module scrapy.signals), 193 scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpauth (module), 166
request_scheduled scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpcache (module), 166
signal, 193 scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpcompression (mod-
request_scheduled() (in module scrapy.signals), 193 ule), 170
Response (class in scrapy.http), 84 scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpproxy (module), 170
response_downloaded scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.redirect (module), 171
signal, 194 scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.retry (module), 172
response_downloaded() (in module scrapy.signals), 194 scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.robotstxt (module), 173
response_received scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.stats (module), 173
signal, 194 scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.useragent (module), 173
response_received() (in module scrapy.signals), 194 scrapy.exceptions (module), 109
RETRY_ENABLED scrapy.exporters (module), 194
setting, 172 scrapy.extensions.closespider (module), 181
RETRY_HTTP_CODES scrapy.extensions.closespider.CloseSpider (class in
setting, 172 scrapy.extensions.closespider), 181
RETRY_PRIORITY_ADJUST scrapy.extensions.corestats (module), 180
setting, 101 scrapy.extensions.debug (module), 182
RETRY_TIMES scrapy.extensions.debug.Debugger (class in
setting, 172 scrapy.extensions.debug), 182
RetryMiddleware (class in scrapy.extensions.debug.StackTraceDump (class in
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.retry), 172 scrapy.extensions.debug), 182
ReturnsContract (class in scrapy.contracts.default), 130 scrapy.extensions.logstats (module), 180
ROBOTSTXT_OBEY scrapy.extensions.memdebug (module), 181
setting, 102 scrapy.extensions.memdebug.MemoryDebugger (class in
RobotsTxtMiddleware (class in scrapy.extensions.memdebug), 181
scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.robotstxt), scrapy.extensions.memusage (module), 180
173 scrapy.extensions.memusage.MemoryUsage (class in
Rule (class in scrapy.spiders), 34 scrapy.extensions.memusage), 180
rules (scrapy.spiders.CrawlSpider attribute), 34 scrapy.extensions.statsmailer (module), 182
runspider scrapy.extensions.statsmailer.StatsMailer (class in
command, 28 scrapy.extensions.statsmailer), 182
scrapy.extensions.telnet (module), 119, 180
S scrapy.extensions.telnet.TelnetConsole (class in
SCHEDULER scrapy.extensions.telnet), 180
setting, 102 scrapy.http (module), 77
SCHEDULER_DEBUG scrapy.item (module), 51
setting, 102 scrapy.linkextractors (module), 87
SCHEDULER_DISK_QUEUE scrapy.linkextractors.lxmlhtml (module), 87
Index 253
scrapy.loader (module), 55, 188 COMPRESSION_ENABLED, 170

scrapy.loader.processors (module), 63 CONCURRENT_ITEMS, 91
scrapy.mail (module), 116 CONCURRENT_REQUESTS, 91
scrapy.pipelines.files (module), 150 CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_DOMAIN, 91
scrapy.pipelines.images (module), 151 CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_IP, 91
scrapy.selector (module), 48 COOKIES_DEBUG, 165
scrapy.settings (module), 185 COOKIES_ENABLED, 165
scrapy.signalmanager (module), 189 DEFAULT_ITEM_CLASS, 92
scrapy.signals (module), 191 DEFAULT_REQUEST_HEADERS, 92
scrapy.spidermiddlewares (module), 174 DEPTH_LIMIT, 92
scrapy.spidermiddlewares.depth (module), 176 DEPTH_PRIORITY, 92
scrapy.spidermiddlewares.httperror (module), 176 DEPTH_STATS, 92
scrapy.spidermiddlewares.offsite (module), 177 DEPTH_STATS_VERBOSE, 93
scrapy.spidermiddlewares.referer (module), 177 DNS_TIMEOUT, 93
scrapy.spidermiddlewares.urllength (module), 177 DNSCACHE_ENABLED, 93
scrapy.spiders (module), 30 DNSCACHE_SIZE, 93
scrapy.statscollectors (module), 116, 190 DOWNLOAD_DELAY, 95
scrapy.utils.log (module), 114 DOWNLOAD_HANDLERS, 95
scrapy.utils.trackref (module), 144 DOWNLOAD_HANDLERS_BASE, 95
SelectJmes (class in scrapy.loader.processors), 64 DOWNLOAD_MAXSIZE, 96
Selector (class in scrapy.selector), 48 DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT, 96
selector (scrapy.http.TextResponse attribute), 86 DOWNLOAD_WARNSIZE, 96
selector (scrapy.loader.ItemLoader attribute), 61 DOWNLOADER, 93
SelectorList (class in scrapy.selector), 49 DOWNLOADER_CLIENT_TLS_METHOD, 94
send() (scrapy.mail.MailSender method), 117 DOWNLOADER_CLIENTCONTEXTFACTORY,
send_catch_log() (scrapy.signalmanager.SignalManager 93
method), 189 DOWNLOADER_HTTPCLIENTFACTORY, 93
send_catch_log_deferred() DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES, 94
(scrapy.signalmanager.SignalManager DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES_BASE, 94
method), 189 DOWNLOADER_STATS, 95
serialize_field() (scrapy.exporters.BaseItemExporter DUPEFILTER_CLASS, 96
method), 196 DUPEFILTER_DEBUG, 97
set() (scrapy.settings.BaseSettings method), 188 EDITOR, 97
set_stats() (scrapy.statscollectors.StatsCollector method), EXTENSIONS, 97
190 EXTENSIONS_BASE, 97
set_value() (scrapy.statscollectors.StatsCollector FEED_EXPORT_ENCODING, 76
method), 190 FEED_EXPORT_FIELDS, 76
setmodule() (scrapy.settings.BaseSettings method), 188 FEED_EXPORTERS, 77
setting FEED_EXPORTERS_BASE, 77
AJAXCRAWL_ENABLED, 173 FEED_FORMAT, 76
AUTOTHROTTLE_DEBUG, 155 FEED_STORAGES, 76
AUTOTHROTTLE_ENABLED, 154 FEED_STORAGES_BASE, 76
AUTOTHROTTLE_MAX_DELAY, 154 FEED_STORE_EMPTY, 76
AUTOTHROTTLE_START_DELAY, 154 FEED_TEMPDIR, 97
AUTOTHROTTLE_TARGET_CONCURRENCY, FEED_URI, 75
154 FILES_EXPIRES, 149
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, 91 FILES_RESULT_FIELD, 148
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, 91 FILES_STORE, 147
BOT_NAME, 91 FILES_STORE_S3_ACL, 148
CLOSESPIDER_ERRORCOUNT, 181 FILES_URLS_FIELD, 148
CLOSESPIDER_ITEMCOUNT, 181 HTTPCACHE_ALWAYS_STORE, 169
CLOSESPIDER_PAGECOUNT, 181 HTTPCACHE_DBM_MODULE, 169
CLOSESPIDER_TIMEOUT, 181 HTTPCACHE_DIR, 169
COMMANDS_MODULE, 29 HTTPCACHE_ENABLED, 168
254 Index
HTTPCACHE_EXPIRATION_SECS, 169 REFERER_ENABLED, 177

HTTPCACHE_GZIP, 169 RETRY_ENABLED, 172
HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_HTTP_CODES, 169 RETRY_HTTP_CODES, 172
HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_MISSING, 169 RETRY_PRIORITY_ADJUST, 101
HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_RESPONSE_CACHE_CONTROLS,RETRY_TIMES, 172
170 ROBOTSTXT_OBEY, 102
HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_SCHEMES, 169 SCHEDULER, 102
HTTPCACHE_POLICY, 169 SCHEDULER_DEBUG, 102
HTTPCACHE_STORAGE, 169 SCHEDULER_DISK_QUEUE, 102
HTTPERROR_ALLOW_ALL, 177 SCHEDULER_MEMORY_QUEUE, 102
HTTPERROR_ALLOWED_CODES, 177 SCHEDULER_PRIORITY_QUEUE, 102
HTTPPROXY_AUTH_ENCODING, 173 SPIDER_CONTRACTS, 103
IMAGES_EXPIRES, 149 SPIDER_CONTRACTS_BASE, 103
IMAGES_MIN_HEIGHT, 150 SPIDER_LOADER_CLASS, 103
IMAGES_MIN_WIDTH, 150 SPIDER_MIDDLEWARES, 103
IMAGES_RESULT_FIELD, 148 SPIDER_MIDDLEWARES_BASE, 103
IMAGES_STORE, 147 SPIDER_MODULES, 104
IMAGES_STORE_S3_ACL, 148 STATS_CLASS, 104
IMAGES_THUMBS, 149 STATS_DUMP, 104
IMAGES_URLS_FIELD, 148 STATSMAILER_RCPTS, 104
ITEM_PIPELINES, 98 TELNETCONSOLE_ENABLED, 104
ITEM_PIPELINES_BASE, 98 TELNETCONSOLE_HOST, 120
LOG_DATEFORMAT, 98 TELNETCONSOLE_PORT, 104, 120
LOG_ENABLED, 98 TEMPLATES_DIR, 104
LOG_ENCODING, 98 URLLENGTH_LIMIT, 105
LOG_FILE, 98 USER_AGENT, 105
LOG_FORMAT, 98 settings
LOG_LEVEL, 99 command, 28
LOG_SHORT_NAMES, 99 Settings (class in scrapy.settings), 186
LOG_STDOUT, 99 settings (scrapy.crawler.Crawler attribute), 183
MAIL_FROM, 118 settings (scrapy.spiders.Spider attribute), 30
MAIL_HOST, 118 SETTINGS_PRIORITIES (in module scrapy.settings),
MAIL_PASS, 118 185
MAIL_PORT, 118 shell
MAIL_SSL, 118 command, 26
MAIL_TLS, 118 signal
MAIL_USER, 118 engine_started, 191
MEMDEBUG_ENABLED, 99 engine_stopped, 191
MEMDEBUG_NOTIFY, 99 item_dropped, 192
MEMUSAGE_CHECK_INTERVAL_SECONDS, item_scraped, 192
100 request_dropped, 193
MEMUSAGE_ENABLED, 99 request_scheduled, 193
MEMUSAGE_LIMIT_MB, 99 response_downloaded, 194
MEMUSAGE_NOTIFY_MAIL, 100 response_received, 194
MEMUSAGE_REPORT, 100 spider_closed, 192
MEMUSAGE_WARNING_MB, 100 spider_error, 193
METAREFRESH_ENABLED, 172 spider_idle, 193
METAREFRESH_MAXDELAY, 172 spider_opened, 192
NEWSPIDER_MODULE, 100 update_telnet_vars, 120
RANDOMIZE_DOWNLOAD_DELAY, 101 SignalManager (class in scrapy.signalmanager), 189
REACTOR_THREADPOOL_MAXSIZE, 101 signals (scrapy.crawler.Crawler attribute), 183
REDIRECT_ENABLED, 171 sitemap_alternate_links (scrapy.spiders.SitemapSpider
REDIRECT_MAX_TIMES, 101, 171 attribute), 38
REDIRECT_PRIORITY_ADJUST, 101
Index 255
sitemap_follow (scrapy.spiders.SitemapSpider attribute), stop() (scrapy.crawler.CrawlerRunner method), 184

38
sitemap_rules (scrapy.spiders.SitemapSpider attribute), T
38 TakeFirst (class in scrapy.loader.processors), 63
sitemap_urls (scrapy.spiders.SitemapSpider attribute), 38 TELNETCONSOLE_ENABLED
SitemapSpider (class in scrapy.spiders), 37 setting, 104
Spider (class in scrapy.spiders), 30 TELNETCONSOLE_HOST
spider (scrapy.crawler.Crawler attribute), 183 setting, 120
spider_closed TELNETCONSOLE_PORT
signal, 192 setting, 104, 120
spider_closed() (in module scrapy.signals), 192 TEMPLATES_DIR
SPIDER_CONTRACTS setting, 104
setting, 103 text (scrapy.http.TextResponse attribute), 86
SPIDER_CONTRACTS_BASE TextResponse (class in scrapy.http), 85
setting, 103
spider_error U
signal, 193 update() (scrapy.settings.BaseSettings method), 188
spider_error() (in module scrapy.signals), 193 update_telnet_vars
spider_idle signal, 120
signal, 193 update_telnet_vars() (in module scrapy.extensions.telnet),
spider_idle() (in module scrapy.signals), 193 120
SPIDER_LOADER_CLASS url (scrapy.http.Request attribute), 79
setting, 103 url (scrapy.http.Response attribute), 84
SPIDER_MIDDLEWARES UrlContract (class in scrapy.contracts.default), 130
setting, 103 urljoin() (scrapy.http.Response method), 85
SPIDER_MIDDLEWARES_BASE URLLENGTH_LIMIT
SPIDER_MODULES UrlLengthMiddleware (class in
setting, 104 scrapy.spidermiddlewares.urllength), 177
spider_opened USER_AGENT
spider_opened() (in module scrapy.signals), 192 UserAgentMiddleware (class in
spider_stats (scrapy.statscollectors.MemoryStatsCollector scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.useragent),
attribute), 116 173
SpiderLoader (class in scrapy.loader), 188
SpiderMiddleware (class in scrapy.spidermiddlewares), V
174
version
start() (scrapy.crawler.CrawlerProcess method), 185
command, 28
start_exporting() (scrapy.exporters.BaseItemExporter
view
method), 196
command, 26
start_requests() (scrapy.spiders.Spider method), 31
start_urls (scrapy.spiders.Spider attribute), 30 X
startproject
XMLFeedSpider (class in scrapy.spiders), 35
command, 23
XmlItemExporter (class in scrapy.exporters), 197
stats (scrapy.crawler.Crawler attribute), 183
XmlResponse (class in scrapy.http), 87
STATS_CLASS
xpath() (scrapy.http.TextResponse method), 86
setting, 104
xpath() (scrapy.selector.Selector method), 49
STATS_DUMP
xpath() (scrapy.selector.SelectorList method), 49
setting, 104
StatsCollector (class in scrapy.statscollectors), 190
STATSMAILER_RCPTS
setting, 104
status (scrapy.http.Response attribute), 84
stop() (scrapy.crawler.CrawlerProcess method), 185
256 Index

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Scrapy Documentation

February 13, 2017

4 Built-in services 111

5 Solving specific problems 123

6 Extending Scrapy 159

7 All the rest 201

Python Module Index 245

This documentation contains everything you need to know about Scrapy.

Having trouble? Wed like to help!

4 Chapter 1. Getting help

2.1 Scrapy at a glance

2.1.1 Walk-through of an example spider

def parse(self, response):

next_page = response.css('li.next a::attr("href")').extract_first()

scrapy runspider quotes_spider.py -o quotes.json

What just happened?

2.1.2 What else?

6 Chapter 2. First steps

2.1.3 Whats next?

2.2 Installation guide

2.2.1 Installing Scrapy

Things that are good to know

2.2. Installation guide 7

Using a virtual environment (recommended)

TL;DR: We recommend installing Scrapy inside a virtual environment on all platforms.

Check this user guide on how to create your virtualenv.

Note: If you use Linux or OS X, virtualenvwrapper is a handy tool to create virtualenvs.

2.2.2 Platform specific installation notes

Install Python 2.7 from https://www.python.org/downloads/

8 Chapter 2. First steps

To update the PATH open a Command prompt and run:

Install pywin32 from http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/

Ubuntu 12.04 or above

python-dev, zlib1g-dev, libxml2-dev and libxslt1-dev are required for lxml

2.2. Installation guide 9

Reload .bashrc to ensure the changes have taken place:

(Optional) Install Scrapy inside an isolated python environment.

Using Anaconda is an alternative to using a virtualenv and installing with pip.

10 Chapter 2. First steps

2.3 Scrapy Tutorial

2.3.1 Creating a project

This will create a tutorial directory with the following contents:

items.py # project items definition file

pipelines.py # project pipelines file

settings.py # project settings file

spiders/ # a directory where you'll later put your spiders

2.3.2 Our first Spider

2.3. Scrapy Tutorial 11

def parse(self, response):

How to run our spider

12 Chapter 2. First steps

2016-12-16 21:24:05 [scrapy.core.engine] INFO: Closing spider (finished)

What just happened under the hood?

A shortcut to the start_requests method

def parse(self, response):

2.3. Scrapy Tutorial 13

scrapy shell "http://quotes.toscrape.com/page/1/"

You will see something like:

As an alternative, you couldve written: