This document describes how to install Scrapy in Linux, Windows and Mac OS X systems and it consists on the following 3 steps:
- Python 2.5 or 2.6 (3.x is not yet supported)
- Twisted 2.5.0, 8.0 or above (Windows users: you'll need to install Zope.Interface and maybe pywin32 because of this Twisted bug)
- libxml2 (versions prior to 2.6.28 are known to have problems parsing certain malformed HTML, and have also been reported to contain leaks, so 2.6.28 or above is highly recommended)
Optional:
- pyopenssl (for HTTPS support, highly recommended)
- simplejson (for (de)serializing JSON)
Scrapy works with Python 2.5 or 2.6, you can get it at http://www.python.org/download/
The procedure for installing the required third party libraries depends on the platform and operating system you use.
If you're running Ubuntu/Debian Linux run the following command as root:
apt-get install python-twisted python-libxml2
To install optional libraries:
apt-get install python-pyopenssl python-simplejson
If you are running Arch Linux run the following command as root:
pacman -S twisted libxml2
To install optional libraries:
pacman -S pyopenssl python-simplejson
First, download Twisted for Mac.
Mac OS X ships an libxml2
version too old to be used by Scrapy. Also, by
looking on the web it seems that installing libxml2
on MacOSX is a bit of a
challenge. Here is a way to achieve this, though not acceptable on the long
run:
Fetch the following libxml2 and libxslt packages:
ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml2/libxml2-2.7.3.tar.gz
ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml2/libxslt-1.1.24.tar.gz
Extract, build and install them both with:
./configure --with-python=/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/ make sudo make install
Replacing
/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Version/2.5/
with your current python framework location.Install libxml2 Python bidings with:
cd libxml2-2.7.3/python sudo make install
The libraries and modules should be installed in something like /usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages. Add it to your
PYTHONPATH
and you are done.Check the
libxml2
library was installed properly with:python -c 'import libxml2'
Download and install:
- Twisted for Windows - you may need to install pywin32 because of this Twisted bug
- Install Zope.Interface (required by Twisted)
- libxml2 for Windows
- PyOpenSSL for Windows
There are three ways to download and install Scrapy:
Download Scrapy from the Download page. Scrapy is distributed in two ways: a
source code tarball (for Unix and Mac OS X systems) and a Windows installer
(for Windows). If you downloaded the tarball you can install it as any Python
package using setup.py
:
tar zxf scrapy-X.X.X.tar.gz
cd scrapy-X.X.X
python setup.py install
If you downloaded the Windows installer, just run it.
Warning
In Windows, you may need to add the C:\Python25\Scripts
(or
C:\Python26\Scripts
) folder to the system path by adding that directory
to the PATH
environment variable from the Control Panel.
Installing with easy_install
You can install Scrapy running easy_install like this:
easy_install -U Scrapy
Note
If you use the development version of Scrapy, you should subscribe to the mailing lists to get notified of any changes to the API.
Check out the latest development code from the Mercurial repository (you need to install Mercurial_ first):
hg clone http://hg.scrapy.org/scrapy scrapy-trunk
Add Scrapy to your Python path
If you're on Linux, Mac or any Unix-like system, you can make a symbolic link to your system
site-packages
directory like this:ln -s /path/to/scrapy-trunk/scrapy SITE-PACKAGES/scrapy
Where
SITE-PACKAGES
is the location of your systemsite-packages
directory. To find this out execute the following:python -c "from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print get_python_lib()"
Alternatively, you can define your
PYTHONPATH
environment variable so that it includes thescrapy-trunk
directory. This solution also works on Windows systems, which don't support symbolic links. (Environment variables can be defined on Windows systems from the Control Panel).Unix-like example:
PYTHONPATH=/path/to/scrapy-trunk
Windows example (from command line, but you should probably use the Control Panel):
set PYTHONPATH=C:\path\to\scrapy-trunk
Make the
scrapy-ctl.py
script availableOn Unix-like systems, create a symbolic link to the file
scrapy-trunk/bin/scrapy-ctl.py
in a directory on your system path, such as/usr/local/bin
. For example:ln -s `pwd`/scrapy-trunk/bin/scrapy-ctl.py /usr/local/bin
This simply lets you type
scrapy-ctl.py
from within any directory, rather than having to qualify the command with the full path to the file.On Windows systems, the same result can be achieved by copying the file
scrapy-trunk/bin/scrapy-ctl.py
to somewhere on your system path, for exampleC:\Python25\Scripts
, which is customary for Python scripts.