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:

.. code:: python

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:

.. code:: python

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:

.. code:: python

from scrapy.spider import BaseSpider

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

  def parse(self, response):
      # do stuff

Becomes:

.. code:: python

from scrapy_boilerplate import NewSpider

MySpider = NewSpider('my_spider')

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

Standard crawl-spider definition:

.. code:: python

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:

.. code:: python

from scrapy_boilerplate import NewCrawlSpider

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

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

Single-spider running script:

.. code:: python

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:

.. code:: python

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.

.. _Scrapy: http://www.scrapy.org .. _PyQuery: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyquery .. _examples: https://github.com/darkrho/scrapy-boilerplate/tree/master/examples