scrapy-boilerplate 0.2.1

Small set of utilities to simplify writing Scrapy spiders.

scrapy-boilerplate is a small set of utilities for Scrapy to simplify writing low-complexity spiders that are very common in small and one-off projects.

It requires Scrapy (>= 0.16) and has been tested using python 2.7. Additionally, PyQuery is required to run the scripts in the examples directory.

Note

The code is experimental, includes some magic under the hood and might be hard to debug. If you are new to Scrapy, don’t use this code unless you are ready to debug errors that nobody have seen before.

Usage Guide

Items

Standard item definition:

from scrapy.item import Item, Field

class BaseItem(Item):
    url = Field()
    crawled = Field()

class UserItem(BaseItem):
    name = Field()
    about = Field()
    location = Field()

class StoryItem(BaseItem):
    title = Field()
    body = Field()
    user = Field()

Becomes:

from scrapy_boilerplate import NewItem

BaseItem = NewItem('url crawled')

UserItem = NewItem('name about location', base_cls=BaseItem)

StoryItem = NewItem('title body user', base_cls=BaseItem)

BaseSpider

Standard spider definition:

from scrapy.spider import BaseSpider

class MySpider(BaseSpider):
    name = 'my_spider'
    start_urls = ['http://example.com/latest']

    def parse(self, response):
        # do stuff

Becomes:

from scrapy_boilerplate import NewSpider

MySpider = NewSpider('my_spider')

@MySpider.scrape('http://example.com/latest')
def parse(spider, response):
    # do stuff

CrawlSpider

Standard crawl-spider definition:

from scrapy.contrib.spiders import CrawlSpider, Rule
from scrapy.contrib.linkextractors.sgml import SgmlLinkExtractor


class MySpider(CrawlSpider):
    name = 'my_spider'
    start_urls = ['http://example.com']

    rules = (
        Rule(SgmlLinkExtractor('category\.php'), follow=True),
        Rule(SgmlLinkExtractor('item\.php'), callback='parse_item'),
    )

    def parse_item(self, response):
        # do stuff

Becomes:

from scrapy_boilerplate import NewCrawlSpider

MySpider = NewCrawlSpider('my_spider')
MySpider.follow('category\.php')

@MySpider.rule('item\.php')
def parse_item(spider, response):
    # do stuff

Running Helpers

Single-spider running script:

# file: my-spider.py
# imports omitted ...

class MySpider(BaseSpider):
    # spider code ...

if __name__ == '__main__':
    from scrapy_boilerplate import run_spider
    custom_settings = {
        # ...
    }
    spider = MySpider()

    run_spider(spider, custom_settings)

Multi-spider script with standard crawl command line options:

# file: my-crawler.py
# imports omitted ...


class MySpider(BaseSpider):
    name = 'my_spider'
    # spider code ...


class OtherSpider(CrawlSpider):
    name = 'other_spider'
    # spider code ...


if __name__ == '__main__':
    from scrapy_boilerplate import run_crawler, SpiderManager
    custom_settings = {
        # ...
    }

    SpiderManager.register(MySpider)
    SpiderManager.register(OtherSpider)

    run_crawler(custom_settings)

Note

See the examples directory for working code examples.