Web extraction with Scrapy and Scrapyd

What is scrapy?

According to the maintainers at Zyte, Scrapy is

An open source and collaborative framework for extracting the data you need from websites. In a fast, simple, yet extensible way.

What is Scrapyd?

According to the documentation,

Scrapyd is an application for deploying and running Scrapy spiders. It enables you to deploy (upload) your projects and control their spiders using a JSON API.

What is this project about?

I was looking for a decent Docker image for Scrapy. I wanted something

• with the most recent version of Python
• easy to update and maintain
• based on Debian

This is it.

Build the Scrapy image

docker-compose -f crawling.yaml build scrapy

does the trick.

Configuration

If you are using RabbitMQ together with Scrapy, you need to provide values for RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_USER and RABBITMQ_DEFAULT_PASS. I find that an environment file is quite convenient here.

Spin the containers up

docker-compose -f crawling.yaml up -d starts the containers for Scrapy and RabbitMQ in detached mode.

Acknowledgements

I thank Itamar Turner-Trauring (@itamarst) for his articles at https://pythonspeed.com and Maximilian Schwarzmüller at ACADEMIND for his excellent course on Docker and Kubernetes.