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.)
Configuration settings¶
Scrapy will look for configuration parameters in ini-style scrapy.cfg
files
in standard locations:
/etc/scrapy.cfg
orc:\scrapy\scrapy.cfg
(system-wide),~/.config/scrapy.cfg
($XDG_CONFIG_HOME
) and~/.scrapy.cfg
($HOME
) for global (user-wide) settings, andscrapy.cfg
inside a scrapy project’s 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)
Default structure of Scrapy projects¶
Before delving into the command-line tool and its sub-commands, let’s 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:
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
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 you’re 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
That will create a Scrapy project under the myproject
directory.
Next, you go inside the new project directory:
cd myproject
And you’re ready to use the scrapy
command to manage and control your
project from there.
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.
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:
Project-only commands:
startproject¶
- Syntax:
scrapy startproject <project_name>
- Requires project: no
Creates a new Scrapy project named project_name
, under the project_name
directory.
Usage example:
$ scrapy startproject myproject
genspider¶
- Syntax:
scrapy genspider [-t template] <name> <domain>
- Requires project: no
Create a new spider in the current folder or in the current project’s spiders
folder, if called from inside a project. The <name>
parameter is set as the spider’s name
, while <domain>
is used to generate the allowed_domains
and start_urls
spider’s 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>
- Requires project: yes
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
- Requires project: yes
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>
- Requires project: yes
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>
- Requires project: no
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.
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>
- Requires project: no
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 it’s what you expect.
Usage example:
$ scrapy view http://www.example.com/some/page.html
[ ... browser starts ... ]
shell¶
- Syntax:
scrapy shell [url]
- Requires project: no
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.
Usage example:
$ scrapy shell http://www.example.com/some/page.html
[ ... scrapy shell starts ... ]
parse¶
- Syntax:
scrapy parse <url> [options]
- Requires project: yes
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:
--spider=SPIDER
: bypass spider autodetection and force use of specific spider--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
: useCrawlSpider
rules to discover the callback (i.e. spider method) to use for parsing the response--noitems
: don’t show scraped items--nolinks
: don’t 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]
- Requires project: no
Get the value of a Scrapy setting.
If used inside a project it’ll show the project setting value, otherwise it’ll 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>
- Requires project: no
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]
- Requires project: no
Prints the Scrapy version. If used with -v
it also prints Python, Twisted
and Platform info, which is useful for bug reports.
bench¶
New in version 0.17.
- Syntax:
scrapy bench
- Requires project: no
Run a quick benchmark test. Benchmarking.
Custom project commands¶
You can also add your custom project commands by using the
COMMANDS_MODULE
setting. See the Scrapy commands 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',
],
},
)