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.
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)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 stuffBecomes:
from scrapy_boilerplate import NewSpider
MySpider = NewSpider('my_spider')
@MySpider.scrape('http://example.com/latest')
def parse(spider, response):
# do stuffStandard 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 stuffBecomes:
from scrapy_boilerplate import NewCrawlSpider
MySpider = NewCrawlSpider('my_spider')
MySpider.follow('category\.php')
@MySpider.rule('item\.php')
def parse_item(spider, response):
# do stuffSingle-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.