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Frequently Asked Questions
How does Scrapy compare to BeautifulSoul or lxml?
BeautifulSoup and lxml are libraries for parsing HTML and XML. Scrapy is an application framework for writing web spiders that crawl web sites and extract data from it. Scrapy provides some mechanisms for extracting data (called selectors) but you can easily use BeautifulSoup or lxml if you feel more comfortable with them. After all, they're just parsing libraries which can be imported and used from any Python code.
In other words, comparing BeautifulSoup or lxml to Scrapy is like comparing urllib or urlparse to Django (a popular Python web framework).
Does Scrapy work with Python 3.0?
No, and there are no plans to port Scrapy to Python 3.0 yet. At the moment Scrapy works with Python 2.5 or 2.6.
Does Scrapy "stole" X from Django?
Probably, but we don't like that word. We think Django is a great open source project and an example to follow, so we've used it as an inspiration for Scrapy.
We believe that, if something is already done well, there's no need to reinvent it. This concept, besides being one of the foundations for open source and free software, not only applies to software but also to documentation, procedures, policies, etc. So, instead of going through each problem ourselves, we choose to copy ideas from those projects that have already solved them properly, and focus on the real problems we need to solve.
We'd be proud if Scrapy serves as an inspiration for other projects. Feel free to steal from us!
Does Scrapy work with HTTP proxies?
No. support for HTTP proxies is not currently implemented in Scrapy, but it will be in the future. For more information about this, follow this ticket. Setting the http_proxy environment variable won't work because Twisted (the library used by Scrapy to download pages) doesn't support it. See this Twisted ticket for more info.
Scrapy crashes with: ImportError: No module named win32api
You need to install pywin32 because of this Twisted bug.
How can I simulate a user login in my spider?
See :ref:`ref-request-userlogin`.
System Message: ERROR/3 (<stdin>, line 72); backlink
Unknown interpreted text role "ref".Can I crawl in depth-first order instead of breadth-first order?
Yes, there's a setting for that: :setting:`SCHEDULER_ORDER`.
System Message: ERROR/3 (<stdin>, line 77); backlink
Unknown interpreted text role "setting".