In this tutorial, we'll assume that Scrapy is already installed in your system. If that's not the case see :ref:`intro-install`.
We are going to use Open directory project (dmoz) as our example domain to scrape.
This tutorial will walk you through through these tasks:
- Creating a new Scrapy project
- Defining the Items you will extract
- Writing a :ref:`spider <topics-spiders>` to crawl a site and extract :ref:`Items <topics-items>`
- Writing an :ref:`Item Pipeline <topics-item-pipeline>` to store the extracted Items
Scrapy is written in Python. If you're 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 you're already familiar with other languages, and want to learn Python quickly, we recommend Dive Into Python. If you're new to programming and want to start with Python, take a look at this list of Python resources for non-programmers.
Before start scraping, you will have set up a new Scrapy project. Enter a directory where you'd like to store your code and then run:
python scrapy-ctl.py startproject dmoz
This will create a dmoz
directory with the following contents:
dmoz/ scrapy-ctl.py dmoz/ __init__.py items.py pipelines.py settings.py spiders/ __init__.py ...
These are basically:
scrapy-ctl.py
: the project's control script.dmoz/
: the project's python module, you'll later import your code from here.dmoz/items.py
: the project's items file.dmoz/pipelines.py
: the project's pipelines file.dmoz/settings.py
: the project's settings file.dmoz/spiders/
: a directory where you'll later put your spiders.
Items are containers that will be loaded with the scraped data, they work like simple python dicts but they offer some additional features like providing default values.
They are declared by creating an :class:`scrapy.item.Item` class an defining its attributes as :class:`scrapy.item.Field` objects, like you will in an ORM (don't worry if you're not familiar with ORM's, you will see that this is an easy task).
We begin by modeling the item that we will use to hold the sites data obtained from dmoz.org, as we want to capture the name, url and description of the sites, we define fields for each of these three attributes. To do that, we edit items.py, found in the dmoz directory. Our Item class looks like:
# Define here the models for your scraped items from scrapy.item import Item, Field class DmozItem(Item): title = Field() link = Field() desc = Field()
This may seem complicated at first, but defining the item allows you to use other handy components of Scrapy that need to know how your item looks like.
Spiders are user written classes to scrape information from a domain (or group of domains).
They define an initial list of URLs to download, how to follow links, and how to parse the contents of those pages to extract :ref:`items <topics-items>`.
To create a Spider, you must subclass :class:`scrapy.spider.BaseSpider`, and define the three main, mandatory, attributes:
:attr:`~scrapy.spider.BaseSpider.name`: identifies the Spider. It must be unique, that is, you can't set the same name for different Spiders.
:attr:`~scrapy.spider.BaseSpider.start_urls`: is a list of URLs where the Spider will begin to crawl from. So, the first pages downloaded will be those listed here. The subsequent URLs will be generated successively from data contained in the start URLs.
:meth:`~scrapy.spider.BaseSpider.parse` is a method of the spider, which will be called with the downloaded :class:`~scrapy.http.Response` object of each start URL. The response is passed to the method as the first and only argument.
This method is responsible for parsing the response data and extracting scraped data (as scraped items) and more URLs to follow.
The :meth:`~scrapy.spider.BaseSpider.parse` method is in charge of processing the response and returning scraped data (as :class:`~scrapy.item.Item` objects) and more URLs to follow (as :class:`~scrapy.http.Request` objects).
This is the code for our first Spider, save it in a file named
dmoz_spider.py
under the dmoz/spiders
directory:
from scrapy.spider import BaseSpider class DmozSpider(BaseSpider): name = "dmoz.org" allowed_domains = ["dmoz.org"] start_urls = [ "http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Books/", "http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Resources/" ] def parse(self, response): filename = response.url.split("/")[-2] open(filename, 'wb').write(response.body) SPIDER = DmozSpider()
To put our spider to work, go to the project's top level directory and run:
python scrapy-ctl.py crawl dmoz.org
The crawl dmoz.org
command runs the spider for the dmoz.org
domain. You
will get an output similar to this:
[-] Log opened. [dmoz] INFO: Enabled extensions: ... [dmoz] INFO: Enabled scheduler middlewares: ... [dmoz] INFO: Enabled downloader middlewares: ... [dmoz] INFO: Enabled spider middlewares: ... [dmoz] INFO: Enabled item pipelines: ... [dmoz.org] INFO: Spider opened [dmoz.org] DEBUG: Crawled <http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Resources/> from <None> [dmoz.org] DEBUG: Crawled <http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Books/> from <None> [dmoz.org] INFO: Spider closed (finished) [-] Main loop terminated.
Pay attention to the lines containing [dmoz.org]
, which corresponds to
our spider (identified by the domain "dmoz.org"
). You can see a log line
for each URL defined in start_urls
. Because these URLs are the starting
ones, they have no referrers, which is shown at the end of the log line,
where it says from <None>
.
But more interesting, as our parse
method instructs, two files have been
created: Books and Resources, with the content of both URLs.
Scrapy creates :class:`scrapy.http.Request` objects for each URL in the
start_urls
attribute of the Spider, and assigns them the parse
method of
the spider as their callback function.
These Requests are scheduled, then executed, and a :class:`scrapy.http.Response` objects are returned and then fed back to the spider, through the :meth:`~scrapy.spider.BaseSpider.parse` method.
There are several ways to extract data from web pages, Scrapy uses a mechanism based on XPath expressions called :ref:`XPath selectors <topics-selectors>`. For more information about selectors and other extraction mechanisms see the :ref:`XPath selectors documentation <topics-selectors>`.
Here are some examples of XPath expressions and their meanings:
/html/head/title
: selects the<title>
element, inside the<head>
element of a HTML document/html/head/title/text()
: selects the text inside the aforementioned<title>
element.//td
: selects all the<td>
elements//div[@class="mine"]
: selects alldiv
elements which contain an attributeclass="mine"
These are just a couple of simple examples of what you can do with XPath, but XPath expression are indeed much more powerful. To learn more about XPath we recommend this XPath tutorial.
For working with XPaths, Scrapy provides a :class:`~scrapy.selector.XPathSelector` class, which comes in two flavours, :class:`~scrapy.selector.HtmlXPatSelector` (for HTML data) and :class:`~scrapy.selector.XmlXPathSelector` (for XML data). In order to use them you must instantiate the desired class with a :class:`~scrapy.http.Response` object.
You can see selectors as objects that represents nodes in the document structure. So, the first instantiated selectors are associated to the root node, or the entire document.
Selectors have three methods (click on the method to see the complete API documentation).
- :meth:`~scrapy.selector.XPathSelector.x`: returns a list of selectors, each of them representing the nodes selected by the xpath expression given as argument.
- :meth:`~scrapy.selector.XPathSelector.extract`: returns a unicode string with
- the data selected by the XPath selector.
- :meth:`~scrapy.selector.XPathSelector.re`: returns a list unicode strings extracted by applying the regular expression given as argument.
To illustrate the use of Selectors we're going to use the built-in :ref:`Scrapy shell <topics-shell>`, which also requires IPython (an extended Python console) installed on your system.
To start a shell you must go to the project's top level directory and run:
python scrapy-ctl.py shell http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Books/
This is what the shell looks like:
[-] Log opened. Welcome to Scrapy shell! Fetching <http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Books/>... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Available Scrapy variables: xxs: <class 'scrapy.selector.XmlXPathSelector'> url: http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Books/ spider: <class 'dmoz.spiders.dmoz.OpenDirectorySpider'> hxs: <class 'scrapy.selector.HtmlXPathSelector'> item: <class 'scrapy.item.Item'> response: <class 'scrapy.http.response.html.HtmlResponse'> Available commands: get [url]: Fetch a new URL or re-fetch current Request shelp: Prints this help. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Python 2.6.1 (r261:67515, Dec 7 2008, 08:27:41) Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. IPython 0.9.1 -- An enhanced Interactive Python. ? -> Introduction and overview of IPython's features. %quickref -> Quick reference. help -> Python's own help system. object? -> Details about 'object'. ?object also works, ?? prints more. In [1]:
After the shell loads, you will have the response fetched in a local
response
variable, so if you type response.body
you will see the body
of the response, or you can response.headers
to see its headers.
The shell also instantiates two selectors, one for HTML (in the hxs
variable) and one for XML (in the xxs
variable)with this response. So let's
try them:
In [1]: hxs.select('/html/head/title') Out[1]: [<HtmlXPathSelector (title) xpath=/html/head/title>] In [2]: hxs.select('/html/head/title').extract() Out[2]: [u'<title>Open Directory - Computers: Programming: Languages: Python: Books</title>'] In [3]: hxs.select('/html/head/title/text()') Out[3]: [<HtmlXPathSelector (text) xpath=/html/head/title/text()>] In [4]: hxs.select('/html/head/title/text()').extract() Out[4]: [u'Open Directory - Computers: Programming: Languages: Python: Books'] In [5]: hxs.select('/html/head/title/text()').re('(\w+):') Out[5]: [u'Computers', u'Programming', u'Languages', u'Python']
Now, let's try to extract some real information from those pages.
You could type response.body
in the console, and inspect the source code to
figure out the XPaths you need to use. However, inspecting the raw HTML code
there could become a very tedious task. To make this an easier task, you can
use some Firefox extensions like Firebug. For more information see
:ref:`topics-firebug` and :ref:`topics-firefox`.
After inspecting the page source you'll find that the web sites information
is inside a <ul>
element, in fact the second <ul>
element.
So we can select each <li>
element belonging to the sites list with this
code:
hxs.select('//ul[2]/li')
And from them, the sites descriptions:
hxs.select('//ul[2]/li/text()').extract()
The sites titles:
hxs.select('//ul[2]/li/a/text()').extract()
And the sites links:
hxs.select('//ul[2]/li/a/@href').extract()
As we said before, each select()
call returns a list of selectors, so we can
concatenate further select()
calls to dig deeper into a node. We are going to use
that property here, so:
sites = hxs.select('//ul[2]/li') for site in sites: title = site.select('a/text()').extract() link = site.select('a/@href').extract() desc = site.select('text()').extract() print title, link, desc
Note
For a more detailed description of using nested selectors see :ref:`topics-selectors-nesting-selectors` and :ref:`topics-selectors-relative-xpaths` in :ref:`topics-selectors` documentation
Let's add this code to our spider:
from scrapy.spider import BaseSpider from scrapy.selector import HtmlXPathSelector class DmozSpider(BaseSpider): name = "dmoz.org" allowed_domains = ["dmoz.org"] start_urls = [ "http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Books/", "http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Resources/" ] def parse(self, response): hxs = HtmlXPathSelector(response) sites = hxs.select('//ul[2]/li') for site in sites: title = site.select('a/text()').extract() link = site.select('a/@href').extract() desc = site.select('text()').extract() print title, link, desc SPIDER = DmozSpider()
Now try crawling the dmoz.org domain again and you'll see sites being printed in your output, run:
python scrapy-ctl.py crawl dmoz.org
:class:`~scrapy.item.Item` objects are custom python dict, you can access the values oftheir fields (attributes of the class we defined earlier) using the standard dict syntax like:
>>> item = DmozItem() >>> item['title'] = 'Example title' >>> item['title'] 'Example title'
Spiders are expected to return their scraped data inside :class:`~scrapy.item.Item` objects, so to actually return the data we've scraped so far, the code for our Spider should be like this:
from scrapy.spider import BaseSpider from scrapy.selector import HtmlXPathSelector from dmoz.items import DmozItem class DmozSpider(BaseSpider): name = "dmoz.org" allowed_domains = ["dmoz.org"] start_urls = [ "http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Books/", "http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Resources/" ] def parse(self, response): hxs = HtmlXPathSelector(response) sites = hxs.select('//ul[2]/li') items = [] for site in sites: item = DmozItem() item['title'] = site.select('a/text()').extract() item['link'] = site.select('a/@href').extract() item['desc'] = site.select('text()').extract() items.append(item) return items SPIDER = DmozSpider()
Now doing a crawl on the dmoz.org domain yields DmozItem
's:
[dmoz.org] DEBUG: Scraped DmozItem(desc=[u' - By David Mertz; Addison Wesley. Book in progress, full text, ASCII format. Asks for feedback. [author website, Gnosis Software, Inc.]\n'], link=[u'http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/'], title=[u'Text Processing in Python']) in <http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Books/> [dmoz.org] DEBUG: Scraped DmozItem(desc=[u' - By Sean McGrath; Prentice Hall PTR, 2000, ISBN 0130211192, has CD-ROM. Methods to build XML applications fast, Python tutorial, DOM and SAX, new Pyxie open source XML processing library. [Prentice Hall PTR]\n'], link=[u'http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0130211192'], title=[u'XML Processing with Python']) in <http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Books/>
After an item has been scraped by a Spider, it is sent to the :ref:`Item Pipeline <topics-item-pipeline>`.
The Item Pipeline is a group of user written Python classes that implement a simple method. They receive an Item and perform an action over it (for example: validation, checking for duplicates, or storing it in a database), and then decide if the Item continues through the Pipeline or it's dropped and no longer processed.
In small projects (like the one on this tutorial) we will use only one Item Pipeline that just stores our Items.
As with Items, a Pipeline placeholder has been set up for you in the project
creation step, it's in dmoz/pipelines.py
and looks like this:
# Define your item pipelines here class DmozPipeline(object): def process_item(self, spider, item): return item
We have to override the process_item
method in order to store our Items
somewhere.
Here's a simple pipeline for storing the scraped items into a CSV (comma separated values) file using the standard library csv module:
import csv class CsvWriterPipeline(object): def __init__(self): self.csvwriter = csv.writer(open('items.csv', 'wb')) def process_item(self, spider, item): self.csvwriter.writerow([item['title'][0], item['link'][0], item['desc'][0]]) return item
Don't forget to enable the pipeline by adding it to the :setting:`ITEM_PIPELINES` setting in your settings.py, like this:
ITEM_PIPELINES = ['dmoz.pipelines.CsvWriterPipeline']
This tutorial covers only the basics of Scrapy, but there's a lot of other features not mentioned here. We recommend you continue reading the section :ref:`topics-index`.