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Scrapy
Fast, high-level Python framework for web crawling and scraping
Scrapy is a cross‑platform Python framework that enables developers to efficiently extract structured data from websites, supporting asynchronous crawling, extensible pipelines, and robust handling of complex sites.
Overview
Overview
Scrapy is a mature, high‑level framework written in Python for extracting structured data from websites. It abstracts the complexities of handling HTTP requests, following links, and parsing content, allowing developers to focus on the data they need. The library works on Windows, macOS, and Linux and requires Python 3.9 or newer.
Capabilities & Deployment
Built on the asynchronous Twisted engine, Scrapy can issue thousands of concurrent requests while respecting site‑specific throttling rules. Its extensible architecture includes middleware, pipelines, and selectors (XPath or CSS) that can be customized for authentication, proxy rotation, data cleaning, and storage. Projects can be run locally via the scrapy crawl command, integrated into CI pipelines, or deployed to cloud services such as Scrapy Cloud for managed scaling. Comprehensive documentation and a large contributor community make it suitable for both small‑scale scripts and enterprise‑grade crawling operations.
Highlights
Asynchronous request handling with Twisted
Extensible middleware and item pipelines
Built‑in selectors using XPath and CSS
Powerful command‑line interface and project scaffolding
Pros
- Mature, well‑documented framework
- High performance through async networking
- Highly extensible via plugins and middleware
- Large community and many third‑party extensions
Considerations
- Steeper learning curve for beginners
- Requires Python 3.9+
- Configuration can become complex for large projects
- Less suited for simple one‑off scripts compared to lightweight libraries
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Fit guide
Great for
- Developers building large‑scale crawlers
- Data scientists needing repeatable extraction pipelines
- Teams requiring robust error handling and retry logic
- Projects that benefit from reusable components and plugins
Not ideal when
- Tiny scripts where a single request suffices
- Users preferring a GUI‑based scraper
- Environments limited to Python <3.9
- Projects needing built‑in headless browser rendering without extra tools
How teams use it
E‑commerce price monitoring
Automated daily extraction of product prices across competitor sites, feeding a pricing dashboard.
News aggregation
Crawls multiple news outlets, extracts headlines and article bodies, and stores them in a searchable index.
Real‑estate data collection
Harvests property listings, images, and location data for market analysis.
Academic research data gathering
Collects large corpora of web pages for natural‑language processing experiments.
Tech snapshot
Python100%
HTML1%
Roff1%
Shell1%
Frequently asked questions
What Python versions does Scrapy support?
Scrapy requires Python 3.9 or newer and is compatible with all later 3.x releases.
Do I need a separate database for storing scraped items?
Scrapy provides item pipelines that can write to databases, files, or external services; the choice depends on your project.
Can Scrapy handle JavaScript‑heavy sites?
Scrapy itself does not execute JavaScript, but it can be combined with tools like Splash or Playwright for rendered content.
How does Scrapy achieve high performance?
It uses Twisted's asynchronous networking engine, allowing many concurrent requests with minimal overhead.
Is there a way to schedule crawls?
Yes, you can run Scrapy from cron, use the built‑in `scrapy crawl` command, or integrate with tools like Scrapy Cloud for managed scheduling.
Project at a glance
Active- Stars
- 59,514
- Watchers
- 59,514
- Forks
- 11,214
LicenseBSD-3-Clause
Repo age15 years old
Last commityesterday
Primary languagePython
Last synced 3 hours ago