Release notes

Scrapy 2.1.0 (2020-04-24)

Highlights:

Backward-incompatible changes

  • AssertionError exceptions triggered by assert statements have been replaced by new exception types, to support running Python in optimized mode (see -O) without changing Scrapy’s behavior in any unexpected ways.

    If you catch an AssertionError exception from Scrapy, update your code to catch the corresponding new exception.

    (issue 4440)

Deprecation removals

  • The LOG_UNSERIALIZABLE_REQUESTS setting is no longer supported, use SCHEDULER_DEBUG instead (issue 4385)

  • The REDIRECT_MAX_METAREFRESH_DELAY setting is no longer supported, use METAREFRESH_MAXDELAY instead (issue 4385)

  • The ChunkedTransferMiddleware middleware has been removed, including the entire scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.chunked module; chunked transfers work out of the box (issue 4431)

  • The spiders property has been removed from Crawler, use CrawlerRunner.spider_loader or instantiate SPIDER_LOADER_CLASS with your settings instead (issue 4398)

  • The MultiValueDict, MultiValueDictKeyError, and SiteNode classes have been removed from scrapy.utils.datatypes (issue 4400)

Deprecations

New features

Bug fixes

Documentation

Quality assurance

Scrapy 2.0.1 (2020-03-18)

Scrapy 2.0.0 (2020-03-03)

Highlights:

Backward-incompatible changes

Deprecation removals

  • The Scrapy shell no longer provides a sel proxy object, use response.selector instead (issue 4347)

  • LevelDB support has been removed (issue 4112)

  • The following functions have been removed from scrapy.utils.python: isbinarytext, is_writable, setattr_default, stringify_dict (issue 4362)

Deprecations

New features

Bug fixes

Documentation

Quality assurance

Changes to scheduler queue classes

The following changes may impact any custom queue classes of all types:

  • The push method no longer receives a second positional parameter containing request.priority * -1. If you need that value, get it from the first positional parameter, request, instead, or use the new priority() method in scrapy.core.scheduler.ScrapyPriorityQueue subclasses.

The following changes may impact custom priority queue classes:

  • In the __init__ method or the from_crawler or from_settings class methods:

    • The parameter that used to contain a factory function, qfactory, is now passed as a keyword parameter named downstream_queue_cls.

    • A new keyword parameter has been added: key. It is a string that is always an empty string for memory queues and indicates the JOB_DIR value for disk queues.

    • The parameter for disk queues that contains data from the previous crawl, startprios or slot_startprios, is now passed as a keyword parameter named startprios.

    • The serialize parameter is no longer passed. The disk queue class must take care of request serialization on its own before writing to disk, using the request_to_dict() and request_from_dict() functions from the scrapy.utils.reqser module.

The following changes may impact custom disk and memory queue classes:

  • The signature of the __init__ method is now __init__(self, crawler, key).

The following changes affect specifically the ScrapyPriorityQueue and DownloaderAwarePriorityQueue classes from scrapy.core.scheduler and may affect subclasses:

  • In the __init__ method, most of the changes described above apply.

    __init__ may still receive all parameters as positional parameters, however:

    • downstream_queue_cls, which replaced qfactory, must be instantiated differently.

      qfactory was instantiated with a priority value (integer).

      Instances of downstream_queue_cls should be created using the new ScrapyPriorityQueue.qfactory or DownloaderAwarePriorityQueue.pqfactory methods.

    • The new key parameter displaced the startprios parameter 1 position to the right.

  • The following class attributes have been added:

    • crawler

    • downstream_queue_cls (details above)

    • key (details above)

  • The serialize attribute has been removed (details above)

The following changes affect specifically the ScrapyPriorityQueue class and may affect subclasses:

  • A new priority() method has been added which, given a request, returns request.priority * -1.

    It is used in push() to make up for the removal of its priority parameter.

  • The spider attribute has been removed. Use crawler.spider instead.

The following changes affect specifically the DownloaderAwarePriorityQueue class and may affect subclasses:

  • A new pqueues attribute offers a mapping of downloader slot names to the corresponding instances of downstream_queue_cls.

(issue 3884)

Scrapy 1.8.0 (2019-10-28)

Highlights:

Backward-incompatible changes

See also Deprecation removals below.

New features

Bug fixes

Documentation

Deprecation removals

Deprecations

Other changes

Scrapy 1.7.4 (2019-10-21)

Revert the fix for issue 3804 (issue 3819), which has a few undesired side effects (issue 3897, issue 3976).

As a result, when an item loader is initialized with an item, ItemLoader.load_item() once again makes later calls to ItemLoader.get_output_value() or ItemLoader.load_item() return empty data.

Scrapy 1.7.3 (2019-08-01)

Enforce lxml 4.3.5 or lower for Python 3.4 (issue 3912, issue 3918).

Scrapy 1.7.2 (2019-07-23)

Fix Python 2 support (issue 3889, issue 3893, issue 3896).

Scrapy 1.7.1 (2019-07-18)

Re-packaging of Scrapy 1.7.0, which was missing some changes in PyPI.

Scrapy 1.7.0 (2019-07-18)

Note

Make sure you install Scrapy 1.7.1. The Scrapy 1.7.0 package in PyPI is the result of an erroneous commit tagging and does not include all the changes described below.

Highlights:

  • Improvements for crawls targeting multiple domains

  • A cleaner way to pass arguments to callbacks

  • A new class for JSON requests

  • Improvements for rule-based spiders

  • New features for feed exports

Backward-incompatible changes

  • 429 is now part of the RETRY_HTTP_CODES setting by default

    This change is backward incompatible. If you don’t want to retry 429, you must override RETRY_HTTP_CODES accordingly.

  • Crawler, CrawlerRunner.crawl and CrawlerRunner.create_crawler no longer accept a Spider subclass instance, they only accept a Spider subclass now.

    Spider subclass instances were never meant to work, and they were not working as one would expect: instead of using the passed Spider subclass instance, their from_crawler method was called to generate a new instance.

  • Non-default values for the SCHEDULER_PRIORITY_QUEUE setting may stop working. Scheduler priority queue classes now need to handle Request objects instead of arbitrary Python data structures.

  • An additional crawler parameter has been added to the __init__ method of the Scheduler class. Custom scheduler subclasses which don’t accept arbitrary parameters in their __init__ method might break because of this change.

    For more information, see SCHEDULER.

See also Deprecation removals below.

New features

Bug fixes

Documentation

Deprecation removals

The following deprecated APIs have been removed (issue 3578):

  • scrapy.conf (use Crawler.settings)

  • From scrapy.core.downloader.handlers:

    • http.HttpDownloadHandler (use http10.HTTP10DownloadHandler)

  • scrapy.loader.ItemLoader._get_values (use _get_xpathvalues)

  • scrapy.loader.XPathItemLoader (use ItemLoader)

  • scrapy.log (see Logging)

  • From scrapy.pipelines:

    • files.FilesPipeline.file_key (use file_path)

    • images.ImagesPipeline.file_key (use file_path)

    • images.ImagesPipeline.image_key (use file_path)

    • images.ImagesPipeline.thumb_key (use thumb_path)

  • From both scrapy.selector and scrapy.selector.lxmlsel:

  • From scrapy.selector.csstranslator:

  • From Selector:

    • _root (both the __init__ method argument and the object property, use root)

    • extract_unquoted (use getall)

    • select (use xpath)

  • From SelectorList:

    • extract_unquoted (use getall)

    • select (use xpath)

    • x (use xpath)

  • scrapy.spiders.BaseSpider (use Spider)

  • From Spider (and subclasses):

  • scrapy.spiders.spiders (use SpiderLoader)

  • scrapy.telnet (use scrapy.extensions.telnet)

  • From scrapy.utils.python:

    • str_to_unicode (use to_unicode)

    • unicode_to_str (use to_bytes)

  • scrapy.utils.response.body_or_str

The following deprecated settings have also been removed (issue 3578):

Deprecations

  • The queuelib.PriorityQueue value for the SCHEDULER_PRIORITY_QUEUE setting is deprecated. Use scrapy.pqueues.ScrapyPriorityQueue instead.

  • process_request callbacks passed to Rule that do not accept two arguments are deprecated.

  • The following modules are deprecated:

  • The scrapy.utils.datatypes.MergeDict class is deprecated for Python 3 code bases. Use ChainMap instead. (issue 3878)

  • The scrapy.utils.gz.is_gzipped function is deprecated. Use scrapy.utils.gz.gzip_magic_number instead.

Other changes

Scrapy 1.6.0 (2019-01-30)

Highlights:

  • better Windows support;

  • Python 3.7 compatibility;

  • big documentation improvements, including a switch from .extract_first() + .extract() API to .get() + .getall() API;

  • feed exports, FilePipeline and MediaPipeline improvements;

  • better extensibility: item_error and request_reached_downloader signals; from_crawler support for feed exporters, feed storages and dupefilters.

  • scrapy.contracts fixes and new features;

  • telnet console security improvements, first released as a backport in Scrapy 1.5.2 (2019-01-22);

  • clean-up of the deprecated code;

  • various bug fixes, small new features and usability improvements across the codebase.

Selector API changes

While these are not changes in Scrapy itself, but rather in the parsel library which Scrapy uses for xpath/css selectors, these changes are worth mentioning here. Scrapy now depends on parsel >= 1.5, and Scrapy documentation is updated to follow recent parsel API conventions.

Most visible change is that .get() and .getall() selector methods are now preferred over .extract_first() and .extract(). We feel that these new methods result in a more concise and readable code. See extract() and extract_first() for more details.

Note

There are currently no plans to deprecate .extract() and .extract_first() methods.

Another useful new feature is the introduction of Selector.attrib and SelectorList.attrib properties, which make it easier to get attributes of HTML elements. See Selecting element attributes.

CSS selectors are cached in parsel >= 1.5, which makes them faster when the same CSS path is used many times. This is very common in case of Scrapy spiders: callbacks are usually called several times, on different pages.

If you’re using custom Selector or SelectorList subclasses, a backward incompatible change in parsel may affect your code. See parsel changelog for a detailed description, as well as for the full list of improvements.

Telnet console

Backward incompatible: Scrapy’s telnet console now requires username and password. See Telnet Console for more details. This change fixes a security issue; see Scrapy 1.5.2 (2019-01-22) release notes for details.

New extensibility features

  • from_crawler support is added to feed exporters and feed storages. This, among other things, allows to access Scrapy settings from custom feed storages and exporters (issue 1605, issue 3348).

  • from_crawler support is added to dupefilters (issue 2956); this allows to access e.g. settings or a spider from a dupefilter.

  • item_error is fired when an error happens in a pipeline (issue 3256);

  • request_reached_downloader is fired when Downloader gets a new Request; this signal can be useful e.g. for custom Schedulers (issue 3393).

  • new SitemapSpider sitemap_filter() method which allows to select sitemap entries based on their attributes in SitemapSpider subclasses (issue 3512).

  • Lazy loading of Downloader Handlers is now optional; this enables better initialization error handling in custom Downloader Handlers (issue 3394).

New FilePipeline and MediaPipeline features

scrapy.contracts improvements

  • Exceptions in contracts code are handled better (issue 3377);

  • dont_filter=True is used for contract requests, which allows to test different callbacks with the same URL (issue 3381);

  • request_cls attribute in Contract subclasses allow to use different Request classes in contracts, for example FormRequest (issue 3383).

  • Fixed errback handling in contracts, e.g. for cases where a contract is executed for URL which returns non-200 response (issue 3371).

Usability improvements

  • more stats for RobotsTxtMiddleware (issue 3100)

  • INFO log level is used to show telnet host/port (issue 3115)

  • a message is added to IgnoreRequest in RobotsTxtMiddleware (issue 3113)

  • better validation of url argument in Response.follow (issue 3131)

  • non-zero exit code is returned from Scrapy commands when error happens on spider initialization (issue 3226)

  • Link extraction improvements: “ftp” is added to scheme list (issue 3152); “flv” is added to common video extensions (issue 3165)

  • better error message when an exporter is disabled (issue 3358);

  • scrapy shell --help mentions syntax required for local files (./file.html) - issue 3496.

  • Referer header value is added to RFPDupeFilter log messages (issue 3588)

Bug fixes

  • fixed issue with extra blank lines in .csv exports under Windows (issue 3039);

  • proper handling of pickling errors in Python 3 when serializing objects for disk queues (issue 3082)

  • flags are now preserved when copying Requests (issue 3342);

  • FormRequest.from_response clickdata shouldn’t ignore elements with input[type=image] (issue 3153).

  • FormRequest.from_response should preserve duplicate keys (issue 3247)

Documentation improvements

Deprecation removals

Compatibility shims for pre-1.0 Scrapy module names are removed (issue 3318):

  • scrapy.command

  • scrapy.contrib (with all submodules)

  • scrapy.contrib_exp (with all submodules)

  • scrapy.dupefilter

  • scrapy.linkextractor

  • scrapy.project

  • scrapy.spider

  • scrapy.spidermanager

  • scrapy.squeue

  • scrapy.stats

  • scrapy.statscol

  • scrapy.utils.decorator

See Module Relocations for more information, or use suggestions from Scrapy 1.5.x deprecation warnings to update your code.

Other deprecation removals:

  • Deprecated scrapy.interfaces.ISpiderManager is removed; please use scrapy.interfaces.ISpiderLoader.

  • Deprecated CrawlerSettings class is removed (issue 3327).

  • Deprecated Settings.overrides and Settings.defaults attributes are removed (issue 3327, issue 3359).

Other improvements, cleanups

Scrapy 1.5.2 (2019-01-22)

  • Security bugfix: Telnet console extension can be easily exploited by rogue websites POSTing content to http://localhost:6023, we haven’t found a way to exploit it from Scrapy, but it is very easy to trick a browser to do so and elevates the risk for local development environment.

    The fix is backward incompatible, it enables telnet user-password authentication by default with a random generated password. If you can’t upgrade right away, please consider setting TELNETCONSOLE_PORT out of its default value.

    See telnet console documentation for more info

  • Backport CI build failure under GCE environment due to boto import error.

Scrapy 1.5.1 (2018-07-12)

This is a maintenance release with important bug fixes, but no new features:

Scrapy 1.5.0 (2017-12-29)

This release brings small new features and improvements across the codebase. Some highlights:

  • Google Cloud Storage is supported in FilesPipeline and ImagesPipeline.

  • Crawling with proxy servers becomes more efficient, as connections to proxies can be reused now.

  • Warnings, exception and logging messages are improved to make debugging easier.

  • scrapy parse command now allows to set custom request meta via --meta argument.

  • Compatibility with Python 3.6, PyPy and PyPy3 is improved; PyPy and PyPy3 are now supported officially, by running tests on CI.

  • Better default handling of HTTP 308, 522 and 524 status codes.

  • Documentation is improved, as usual.

Backward Incompatible Changes

  • Scrapy 1.5 drops support for Python 3.3.

  • Default Scrapy User-Agent now uses https link to scrapy.org (issue 2983). This is technically backward-incompatible; override USER_AGENT if you relied on old value.

  • Logging of settings overridden by custom_settings is fixed; this is technically backward-incompatible because the logger changes from [scrapy.utils.log] to [scrapy.crawler]. If you’re parsing Scrapy logs, please update your log parsers (issue 1343).

  • LinkExtractor now ignores m4v extension by default, this is change in behavior.

  • 522 and 524 status codes are added to RETRY_HTTP_CODES (issue 2851)

New features

  • Support <link> tags in Response.follow (issue 2785)

  • Support for ptpython REPL (issue 2654)

  • Google Cloud Storage support for FilesPipeline and ImagesPipeline (issue 2923).

  • New --meta option of the “scrapy parse” command allows to pass additional request.meta (issue 2883)

  • Populate spider variable when using shell.inspect_response (issue 2812)

  • Handle HTTP 308 Permanent Redirect (issue 2844)

  • Add 522 and 524 to RETRY_HTTP_CODES (issue 2851)

  • Log versions information at startup (issue 2857)

  • scrapy.mail.MailSender now works in Python 3 (it requires Twisted 17.9.0)

  • Connections to proxy servers are reused (issue 2743)

  • Add template for a downloader middleware (issue 2755)

  • Explicit message for NotImplementedError when parse callback not defined (issue 2831)

  • CrawlerProcess got an option to disable installation of root log handler (issue 2921)

  • LinkExtractor now ignores m4v extension by default

  • Better log messages for responses over DOWNLOAD_WARNSIZE and DOWNLOAD_MAXSIZE limits (issue 2927)

  • Show warning when a URL is put to Spider.allowed_domains instead of a domain (issue 2250).

Bug fixes

  • Fix logging of settings overridden by custom_settings; this is technically backward-incompatible because the logger changes from [scrapy.utils.log] to [scrapy.crawler], so please update your log parsers if needed (issue 1343)

  • Default Scrapy User-Agent now uses https link to scrapy.org (issue 2983). This is technically backward-incompatible; override USER_AGENT if you relied on old value.

  • Fix PyPy and PyPy3 test failures, support them officially (issue 2793, issue 2935, issue 2990, issue 3050, issue 2213, issue 3048)

  • Fix DNS resolver when DNSCACHE_ENABLED=False (issue 2811)

  • Add cryptography for Debian Jessie tox test env (issue 2848)

  • Add verification to check if Request callback is callable (issue 2766)

  • Port extras/qpsclient.py to Python 3 (issue 2849)

  • Use getfullargspec under the scenes for Python 3 to stop DeprecationWarning (issue 2862)

  • Update deprecated test aliases (issue 2876)

  • Fix SitemapSpider support for alternate links (issue 2853)

Docs

  • Added missing bullet point for the AUTOTHROTTLE_TARGET_CONCURRENCY setting. (issue 2756)

  • Update Contributing docs, document new support channels (issue 2762, issue:3038)

  • Include references to Scrapy subreddit in the docs

  • Fix broken links; use https:// for external links (issue 2978, issue 2982, issue 2958)

  • Document CloseSpider extension better (issue 2759)

  • Use pymongo.collection.Collection.insert_one() in MongoDB example (issue 2781)

  • Spelling mistake and typos (issue 2828, issue 2837, issue 2884, issue 2924)

  • Clarify CSVFeedSpider.headers documentation (issue 2826)

  • Document DontCloseSpider exception and clarify spider_idle (issue 2791)

  • Update “Releases” section in README (issue 2764)

  • Fix rst syntax in DOWNLOAD_FAIL_ON_DATALOSS docs (issue 2763)

  • Small fix in description of startproject arguments (issue 2866)

  • Clarify data types in Response.body docs (issue 2922)

  • Add a note about request.meta['depth'] to DepthMiddleware docs (issue 2374)

  • Add a note about request.meta['dont_merge_cookies'] to CookiesMiddleware docs (issue 2999)

  • Up-to-date example of project structure (issue 2964, issue 2976)

  • A better example of ItemExporters usage (issue 2989)

  • Document from_crawler methods for spider and downloader middlewares (issue 3019)

Scrapy 1.4.0 (2017-05-18)

Scrapy 1.4 does not bring that many breathtaking new features but quite a few handy improvements nonetheless.

Scrapy now supports anonymous FTP sessions with customizable user and password via the new FTP_USER and FTP_PASSWORD settings. And if you’re using Twisted version 17.1.0 or above, FTP is now available with Python 3.

There’s a new response.follow method for creating requests; it is now a recommended way to create Requests in Scrapy spiders. This method makes it easier to write correct spiders; response.follow has several advantages over creating scrapy.Request objects directly:

  • it handles relative URLs;

  • it works properly with non-ascii URLs on non-UTF8 pages;

  • in addition to absolute and relative URLs it supports Selectors; for <a> elements it can also extract their href values.

For example, instead of this:

  1. for href in response.css('li.page a::attr(href)').extract():
  2.     url = response.urljoin(href)
  3.     yield scrapy.Request(url, self.parse, encoding=response.encoding)

One can now write this:

  1. for a in response.css('li.page a'):
  2.     yield response.follow(a, self.parse)

Link extractors are also improved. They work similarly to what a regular modern browser would do: leading and trailing whitespace are removed from attributes (think href=" http://example.com") when building Link objects. This whitespace-stripping also happens for action attributes with FormRequest.

Please also note that link extractors do not canonicalize URLs by default anymore. This was puzzling users every now and then, and it’s not what browsers do in fact, so we removed that extra transformation on extracted links.

For those of you wanting more control on the Referer: header that Scrapy sends when following links, you can set your own Referrer Policy. Prior to Scrapy 1.4, the default RefererMiddleware would simply and blindly set it to the URL of the response that generated the HTTP request (which could leak information on your URL seeds). By default, Scrapy now behaves much like your regular browser does. And this policy is fully customizable with W3C standard values (or with something really custom of your own if you wish). See REFERRER_POLICY for details.

To make Scrapy spiders easier to debug, Scrapy logs more stats by default in 1.4: memory usage stats, detailed retry stats, detailed HTTP error code stats. A similar change is that HTTP cache path is also visible in logs now.

Last but not least, Scrapy now has the option to make JSON and XML items more human-readable, with newlines between items and even custom indenting offset, using the new FEED_EXPORT_INDENT setting.

Enjoy! (Or read on for the rest of changes in this release.)

Deprecations and Backward Incompatible Changes

  • Default to canonicalize=False in scrapy.linkextractors.LinkExtractor (issue 2537, fixes issue 1941 and issue 1982): warning, this is technically backward-incompatible

  • Enable memusage extension by default (issue 2539, fixes issue 2187); this is technically backward-incompatible so please check if you have any non-default MEMUSAGE_*** options set.

  • EDITOR environment variable now takes precedence over EDITOR option defined in settings.py (issue 1829); Scrapy default settings no longer depend on environment variables. This is technically a backward incompatible change.

  • Spider.make_requests_from_url is deprecated (issue 1728, fixes issue 1495).

New Features

Bug fixes

Cleanups & Refactoring

  • Tests: remove temp files and folders (issue 2570), fixed ProjectUtilsTest on macOS (issue 2569), use portable pypy for Linux on Travis CI (issue 2710)

  • Separate building request from _requests_to_follow in CrawlSpider (issue 2562)

  • Remove “Python 3 progress” badge (issue 2567)

  • Add a couple more lines to .gitignore (issue 2557)

  • Remove bumpversion prerelease configuration (issue 2159)

  • Add codecov.yml file (issue 2750)

  • Set context factory implementation based on Twisted version (issue 2577, fixes issue 2560)

  • Add omitted self arguments in default project middleware template (issue 2595)

  • Remove redundant slot.add_request() call in ExecutionEngine (issue 2617)

  • Catch more specific os.error exception in scrapy.pipelines.files.FSFilesStore (issue 2644)

  • Change “localhost” test server certificate (issue 2720)

  • Remove unused MEMUSAGE_REPORT setting (issue 2576)

Documentation

Scrapy 1.3.3 (2017-03-10)

Bug fixes

  • Make SpiderLoader raise ImportError again by default for missing dependencies and wrong SPIDER_MODULES. These exceptions were silenced as warnings since 1.3.0. A new setting is introduced to toggle between warning or exception if needed ; see SPIDER_LOADER_WARN_ONLY for details.

Scrapy 1.3.2 (2017-02-13)

Bug fixes

  • Preserve request class when converting to/from dicts (utils.reqser) (issue 2510).

  • Use consistent selectors for author field in tutorial (issue 2551).

  • Fix TLS compatibility in Twisted 17+ (issue 2558)

Scrapy 1.3.1 (2017-02-08)

New features

  • Support 'True' and 'False' string values for boolean settings (issue 2519); you can now do something like scrapy crawl myspider -s REDIRECT_ENABLED=False.

  • Support kwargs with response.xpath() to use XPath variables and ad-hoc namespaces declarations ; this requires at least Parsel v1.1 (issue 2457).

  • Add support for Python 3.6 (issue 2485).

  • Run tests on PyPy (warning: some tests still fail, so PyPy is not supported yet).

Bug fixes

  • Enforce DNS_TIMEOUT setting (issue 2496).

  • Fix view command ; it was a regression in v1.3.0 (issue 2503).

  • Fix tests regarding *_EXPIRES settings with Files/Images pipelines (issue 2460).

  • Fix name of generated pipeline class when using basic project template (issue 2466).

  • Fix compatibility with Twisted 17+ (issue 2496, issue 2528).

  • Fix scrapy.Item inheritance on Python 3.6 (issue 2511).

  • Enforce numeric values for components order in SPIDER_MIDDLEWARES, DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES, EXTENIONS and SPIDER_CONTRACTS (issue 2420).

Documentation

  • Reword Code of Conduct section and upgrade to Contributor Covenant v1.4 (issue 2469).

  • Clarify that passing spider arguments converts them to spider attributes (issue 2483).

  • Document formid argument on FormRequest.from_response() (issue 2497).

  • Add .rst extension to README files (issue 2507).

  • Mention LevelDB cache storage backend (issue 2525).

  • Use yield in sample callback code (issue 2533).

  • Add note about HTML entities decoding with .re()/.re_first() (issue 1704).

  • Typos (issue 2512, issue 2534, issue 2531).

Cleanups

  • Remove redundant check in MetaRefreshMiddleware (issue 2542).

  • Faster checks in LinkExtractor for allow/deny patterns (issue 2538).

  • Remove dead code supporting old Twisted versions (issue 2544).

Scrapy 1.3.0 (2016-12-21)

This release comes rather soon after 1.2.2 for one main reason: it was found out that releases since 0.18 up to 1.2.2 (included) use some backported code from Twisted (scrapy.xlib.tx.*), even if newer Twisted modules are available. Scrapy now uses twisted.web.client and twisted.internet.endpoints directly. (See also cleanups below.)

As it is a major change, we wanted to get the bug fix out quickly while not breaking any projects using the 1.2 series.

New Features

  • MailSender now accepts single strings as values for to and cc arguments (issue 2272)

  • scrapy fetch url, scrapy shell url and fetch(url) inside Scrapy shell now follow HTTP redirections by default (issue 2290); See fetch and shell for details.

  • HttpErrorMiddleware now logs errors with INFO level instead of DEBUG; this is technically backward incompatible so please check your log parsers.

  • By default, logger names now use a long-form path, e.g. [scrapy.extensions.logstats], instead of the shorter “top-level” variant of prior releases (e.g. [scrapy]); this is backward incompatible if you have log parsers expecting the short logger name part. You can switch back to short logger names using LOG_SHORT_NAMES set to True.

Dependencies & Cleanups

  • Scrapy now requires Twisted >= 13.1 which is the case for many Linux distributions already.

  • As a consequence, we got rid of scrapy.xlib.tx.* modules, which copied some of Twisted code for users stuck with an “old” Twisted version

  • ChunkedTransferMiddleware is deprecated and removed from the default downloader middlewares.

Scrapy 1.2.3 (2017-03-03)

  • Packaging fix: disallow unsupported Twisted versions in setup.py

Scrapy 1.2.2 (2016-12-06)

Bug fixes

  • Fix a cryptic traceback when a pipeline fails on open_spider() (issue 2011)

  • Fix embedded IPython shell variables (fixing issue 396 that re-appeared in 1.2.0, fixed in issue 2418)

  • A couple of patches when dealing with robots.txt:

    • handle (non-standard) relative sitemap URLs (issue 2390)

    • handle non-ASCII URLs and User-Agents in Python 2 (issue 2373)

Documentation

Other changes

  • Advertize conda-forge as Scrapy’s official conda channel (issue 2387)

  • More helpful error messages when trying to use .css() or .xpath() on non-Text Responses (issue 2264)

  • startproject command now generates a sample middlewares.py file (issue 2335)

  • Add more dependencies’ version info in scrapy version verbose output (issue 2404)

  • Remove all *.pyc files from source distribution (issue 2386)

Scrapy 1.2.1 (2016-10-21)

Bug fixes

  • Include OpenSSL’s more permissive default ciphers when establishing TLS/SSL connections (issue 2314).

  • Fix “Location” HTTP header decoding on non-ASCII URL redirects (issue 2321).

Documentation

Other changes

  • Removed www. from start_urls in built-in spider templates (issue 2299).

Scrapy 1.2.0 (2016-10-03)

New Features

  • New FEED_EXPORT_ENCODING setting to customize the encoding used when writing items to a file. This can be used to turn off \uXXXX escapes in JSON output. This is also useful for those wanting something else than UTF-8 for XML or CSV output (issue 2034).

  • startproject command now supports an optional destination directory to override the default one based on the project name (issue 2005).

  • New SCHEDULER_DEBUG setting to log requests serialization failures (issue 1610).

  • JSON encoder now supports serialization of set instances (issue 2058).

  • Interpret application/json-amazonui-streaming as TextResponse (issue 1503).

  • scrapy is imported by default when using shell tools (shell, inspect_response) (issue 2248).

Bug fixes

  • DefaultRequestHeaders middleware now runs before UserAgent middleware (issue 2088). Warning: this is technically backward incompatible, though we consider this a bug fix.

  • HTTP cache extension and plugins that use the .scrapy data directory now work outside projects (issue 1581). Warning: this is technically backward incompatible, though we consider this a bug fix.

  • Selector does not allow passing both response and text anymore (issue 2153).

  • Fixed logging of wrong callback name with scrapy parse (issue 2169).

  • Fix for an odd gzip decompression bug (issue 1606).

  • Fix for selected callbacks when using CrawlSpider with scrapy parse (issue 2225).

  • Fix for invalid JSON and XML files when spider yields no items (issue 872).

  • Implement flush() fpr StreamLogger avoiding a warning in logs (issue 2125).

Refactoring

Tests & Requirements

Scrapy’s new requirements baseline is Debian 8 “Jessie”. It was previously Ubuntu 12.04 Precise. What this means in practice is that we run continuous integration tests with these (main) packages versions at a minimum: Twisted 14.0, pyOpenSSL 0.14, lxml 3.4.

Scrapy may very well work with older versions of these packages (the code base still has switches for older Twisted versions for example) but it is not guaranteed (because it’s not tested anymore).

Documentation

Scrapy 1.1.4 (2017-03-03)

  • Packaging fix: disallow unsupported Twisted versions in setup.py

Scrapy 1.1.3 (2016-09-22)

Bug fixes

  • Class attributes for subclasses of ImagesPipeline and FilesPipeline work as they did before 1.1.1 (issue 2243, fixes issue 2198)

Documentation

Scrapy 1.1.2 (2016-08-18)

Bug fixes

  • Introduce a missing IMAGES_STORE_S3_ACL setting to override the default ACL policy in ImagesPipeline when uploading images to S3 (note that default ACL policy is “private” – instead of “public-read” – since Scrapy 1.1.0)

  • IMAGES_EXPIRES default value set back to 90 (the regression was introduced in 1.1.1)

Scrapy 1.1.1 (2016-07-13)

Bug fixes

  • Add “Host” header in CONNECT requests to HTTPS proxies (issue 2069)

  • Use response body when choosing response class (issue 2001, fixes issue 2000)

  • Do not fail on canonicalizing URLs with wrong netlocs (issue 2038, fixes issue 2010)

  • a few fixes for HttpCompressionMiddleware (and SitemapSpider):

  • Catch (and ignore with a warning) exception when verifying certificate against IP-address hosts (issue 2094, fixes issue 2092)

  • Make FilesPipeline and ImagesPipeline backward compatible again regarding the use of legacy class attributes for customization (issue 1989, fixes issue 1985)

New features

  • Enable genspider command outside project folder (issue 2052)

  • Retry HTTPS CONNECT TunnelError by default (issue 1974)

Documentation

Tests

  • Upgrade py.test requirement on Travis CI and Pin pytest-cov to 2.2.1 (issue 2095)

Scrapy 1.1.0 (2016-05-11)

This 1.1 release brings a lot of interesting features and bug fixes:

  • Scrapy 1.1 has beta Python 3 support (requires Twisted >= 15.5). See Beta Python 3 Support for more details and some limitations.

  • Hot new features:

  • These bug fixes may require your attention:

    • Don’t retry bad requests (HTTP 400) by default (issue 1289). If you need the old behavior, add 400 to RETRY_HTTP_CODES.

    • Fix shell files argument handling (issue 1710, issue 1550). If you try scrapy shell index.html it will try to load the URL http://index.html, use scrapy shell ./index.html to load a local file.

    • Robots.txt compliance is now enabled by default for newly-created projects (issue 1724). Scrapy will also wait for robots.txt to be downloaded before proceeding with the crawl (issue 1735). If you want to disable this behavior, update ROBOTSTXT_OBEY in settings.py file after creating a new project.

    • Exporters now work on unicode, instead of bytes by default (issue 1080). If you use PythonItemExporter, you may want to update your code to disable binary mode which is now deprecated.

    • Accept XML node names containing dots as valid (issue 1533).

    • When uploading files or images to S3 (with FilesPipeline or ImagesPipeline), the default ACL policy is now “private” instead of “public” Warning: backward incompatible!. You can use FILES_STORE_S3_ACL to change it.

    • We’ve reimplemented canonicalize_url() for more correct output, especially for URLs with non-ASCII characters (issue 1947). This could change link extractors output compared to previous Scrapy versions. This may also invalidate some cache entries you could still have from pre-1.1 runs. Warning: backward incompatible!.

Keep reading for more details on other improvements and bug fixes.

Beta Python 3 Support

We have been hard at work to make Scrapy run on Python 3. As a result, now you can run spiders on Python 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5 (Twisted >= 15.5 required). Some features are still missing (and some may never be ported).

Almost all builtin extensions/middlewares are expected to work. However, we are aware of some limitations in Python 3:

  • Scrapy does not work on Windows with Python 3

  • Sending emails is not supported

  • FTP download handler is not supported

  • Telnet console is not supported

Additional New Features and Enhancements

Deprecations and Removals

  • Added to_bytes and to_unicode, deprecated str_to_unicode and unicode_to_str functions (issue 778).

  • binary_is_text is introduced, to replace use of isbinarytext (but with inverse return value) (issue 1851)

  • The optional_features set has been removed (issue 1359).

  • The --lsprof command line option has been removed (issue 1689). Warning: backward incompatible, but doesn’t break user code.

  • The following datatypes were deprecated (issue 1720):

    • scrapy.utils.datatypes.MultiValueDictKeyError

    • scrapy.utils.datatypes.MultiValueDict

    • scrapy.utils.datatypes.SiteNode

  • The previously bundled scrapy.xlib.pydispatch library was deprecated and replaced by pydispatcher.

Relocations

Bugfixes

Scrapy 1.0.7 (2017-03-03)

  • Packaging fix: disallow unsupported Twisted versions in setup.py

Scrapy 1.0.6 (2016-05-04)

  • FIX: RetryMiddleware is now robust to non-standard HTTP status codes (issue 1857)

  • FIX: Filestorage HTTP cache was checking wrong modified time (issue 1875)

  • DOC: Support for Sphinx 1.4+ (issue 1893)

  • DOC: Consistency in selectors examples (issue 1869)

Scrapy 1.0.5 (2016-02-04)

Scrapy 1.0.4 (2015-12-30)

Scrapy 1.0.3 (2015-08-11)

Scrapy 1.0.2 (2015-08-06)

Scrapy 1.0.1 (2015-07-01)

Scrapy 1.0.0 (2015-06-19)

You will find a lot of new features and bugfixes in this major release. Make sure to check our updated overview to get a glance of some of the changes, along with our brushed tutorial.

Support for returning dictionaries in spiders

Declaring and returning Scrapy Items is no longer necessary to collect the scraped data from your spider, you can now return explicit dictionaries instead.

Classic version

  1. class MyItem(scrapy.Item):
  2.     url = scrapy.Field()
  4. class MySpider(scrapy.Spider):
  5.     def parse(self, response):
  6.         return MyItem(url=response.url)

New version

  1. class MySpider(scrapy.Spider):
  2.     def parse(self, response):
  3.         return {'url': response.url}

Per-spider settings (GSoC 2014)

Last Google Summer of Code project accomplished an important redesign of the mechanism used for populating settings, introducing explicit priorities to override any given setting. As an extension of that goal, we included a new level of priority for settings that act exclusively for a single spider, allowing them to redefine project settings.

Start using it by defining a custom_settings class variable in your spider:

  1. class MySpider(scrapy.Spider):
  2.     custom_settings = {
  3.         "DOWNLOAD_DELAY": 5.0,
  4.         "RETRY_ENABLED": False,
  5.     }

Read more about settings population: Settings

Python Logging

Scrapy 1.0 has moved away from Twisted logging to support Python built in’s as default logging system. We’re maintaining backward compatibility for most of the old custom interface to call logging functions, but you’ll get warnings to switch to the Python logging API entirely.

Old version

  1. from scrapy import log
  2. log.msg('MESSAGE', log.INFO)

New version

  1. import logging
  2. logging.info('MESSAGE')

Logging with spiders remains the same, but on top of the log() method you’ll have access to a custom logger created for the spider to issue log events:

  1. class MySpider(scrapy.Spider):
  2.     def parse(self, response):
  3.         self.logger.info('Response received')

Read more in the logging documentation: Logging

Crawler API refactoring (GSoC 2014)

Another milestone for last Google Summer of Code was a refactoring of the internal API, seeking a simpler and easier usage. Check new core interface in: Core API

A common situation where you will face these changes is while running Scrapy from scripts. Here’s a quick example of how to run a Spider manually with the new API:

  1. from scrapy.crawler import CrawlerProcess
  3. process = CrawlerProcess({
  4.     'USER_AGENT': 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)'
  5. })
  6. process.crawl(MySpider)
  7. process.start()

Bear in mind this feature is still under development and its API may change until it reaches a stable status.

See more examples for scripts running Scrapy: Common Practices

Module Relocations

There’s been a large rearrangement of modules trying to improve the general structure of Scrapy. Main changes were separating various subpackages into new projects and dissolving both scrapy.contrib and scrapy.contrib_exp into top level packages. Backward compatibility was kept among internal relocations, while importing deprecated modules expect warnings indicating their new place.

Full list of relocations

Outsourced packages

Note

These extensions went through some minor changes, e.g. some setting names were changed. Please check the documentation in each new repository to get familiar with the new usage.

Old location

New location

scrapy.commands.deploy

scrapyd-client (See other alternatives here: Deploying Spiders)

scrapy.contrib.djangoitem

scrapy-djangoitem

scrapy.webservice

scrapy-jsonrpc

scrapy.contrib_exp and scrapy.contrib dissolutions

Old location

New location

scrapy.contrib_exp.downloadermiddleware.decompression

scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.decompression

scrapy.contrib_exp.iterators

scrapy.utils.iterators

scrapy.contrib.downloadermiddleware

scrapy.downloadermiddlewares

scrapy.contrib.exporter

scrapy.exporters

scrapy.contrib.linkextractors

scrapy.linkextractors

scrapy.contrib.loader

scrapy.loader

scrapy.contrib.loader.processor

scrapy.loader.processors

scrapy.contrib.pipeline

scrapy.pipelines

scrapy.contrib.spidermiddleware

scrapy.spidermiddlewares

scrapy.contrib.spiders

scrapy.spiders

  • scrapy.contrib.closespider

  • scrapy.contrib.corestats

  • scrapy.contrib.debug

  • scrapy.contrib.feedexport

  • scrapy.contrib.httpcache

  • scrapy.contrib.logstats

  • scrapy.contrib.memdebug

  • scrapy.contrib.memusage

  • scrapy.contrib.spiderstate

  • scrapy.contrib.statsmailer

  • scrapy.contrib.throttle

scrapy.extensions.*

Plural renames and Modules unification

Old location

New location

scrapy.command

scrapy.commands

scrapy.dupefilter

scrapy.dupefilters

scrapy.linkextractor

scrapy.linkextractors

scrapy.spider

scrapy.spiders

scrapy.squeue

scrapy.squeues

scrapy.statscol

scrapy.statscollectors

scrapy.utils.decorator

scrapy.utils.decorators

Class renames

Old location

New location

scrapy.spidermanager.SpiderManager

scrapy.spiderloader.SpiderLoader

Settings renames

Old location

New location

SPIDER_MANAGER_CLASS

SPIDER_LOADER_CLASS

Changelog

New Features and Enhancements

Deprecations and Removals

  • Deprecate htmlparser link extractor (issue 1205)

  • remove deprecated code from FeedExporter (issue 1155)

  • a leftover for.15 compatibility (issue 925)

  • drop support for CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_SPIDER (issue 895)

  • Drop old engine code (issue 911)

  • Deprecate SgmlLinkExtractor (issue 777)

Relocations

Documentation

Bugfixes

  • Item multi inheritance fix (issue 353, issue 1228)

  • ItemLoader.load_item: iterate over copy of fields (issue 722)

  • Fix Unhandled error in Deferred (RobotsTxtMiddleware) (issue 1131, issue 1197)

  • Force to read DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT as int (issue 954)

  • scrapy.utils.misc.load_object should print full traceback (issue 902)

  • Fix bug for “.local” host name (issue 878)

  • Fix for Enabled extensions, middlewares, pipelines info not printed anymore (issue 879)

  • fix dont_merge_cookies bad behaviour when set to false on meta (issue 846)

Python 3 In Progress Support

  • disable scrapy.telnet if twisted.conch is not available (issue 1161)

  • fix Python 3 syntax errors in ajaxcrawl.py (issue 1162)

  • more python3 compatibility changes for urllib (issue 1121)

  • assertItemsEqual was renamed to assertCountEqual in Python 3. (issue 1070)

  • Import unittest.mock if available. (issue 1066)

  • updated deprecated cgi.parse_qsl to use six’s parse_qsl (issue 909)

  • Prevent Python 3 port regressions (issue 830)

  • PY3: use MutableMapping for python 3 (issue 810)

  • PY3: use six.BytesIO and six.moves.cStringIO (issue 803)

  • PY3: fix xmlrpclib and email imports (issue 801)

  • PY3: use six for robotparser and urlparse (issue 800)

  • PY3: use six.iterkeys, six.iteritems, and tempfile (issue 799)

  • PY3: fix has_key and use six.moves.configparser (issue 798)

  • PY3: use six.moves.cPickle (issue 797)

  • PY3 make it possible to run some tests in Python3 (issue 776)

Tests

  • remove unnecessary lines from py3-ignores (issue 1243)

  • Fix remaining warnings from pytest while collecting tests (issue 1206)

  • Add docs build to travis (issue 1234)

  • TST don’t collect tests from deprecated modules. (issue 1165)

  • install service_identity package in tests to prevent warnings (issue 1168)

  • Fix deprecated settings API in tests (issue 1152)

  • Add test for webclient with POST method and no body given (issue 1089)

  • py3-ignores.txt supports comments (issue 1044)

  • modernize some of the asserts (issue 835)

  • selector.__repr__ test (issue 779)

Code refactoring

  • CSVFeedSpider cleanup: use iterate_spider_output (issue 1079)

  • remove unnecessary check from scrapy.utils.spider.iter_spider_output (issue 1078)

  • Pydispatch pep8 (issue 992)

  • Removed unused ‘load=False’ parameter from walk_modules() (issue 871)

  • For consistency, use job_dir helper in SpiderState extension. (issue 805)

  • rename “sflo” local variables to less cryptic “log_observer” (issue 775)

Scrapy 0.24.6 (2015-04-20)

Scrapy 0.24.5 (2015-02-25)

Scrapy 0.24.4 (2014-08-09)

Scrapy 0.24.3 (2014-08-09)

Scrapy 0.24.2 (2014-07-08)

  • Use a mutable mapping to proxy deprecated settings.overrides and settings.defaults attribute (commit e5e8133)

  • there is not support for python3 yet (commit 3cd6146)

  • Update python compatible version set to Debian packages (commit fa5d76b)

  • DOC fix formatting in release notes (commit c6a9e20)

Scrapy 0.24.1 (2014-06-27)

  • Fix deprecated CrawlerSettings and increase backward compatibility with .defaults attribute (commit 8e3f20a)

Scrapy 0.24.0 (2014-06-26)

Enhancements

Bugfixes

  • Encode unicode URL value when creating Links in RegexLinkExtractor (issue 561)

  • Ignore None values in ItemLoader processors (issue 556)

  • Fix link text when there is an inner tag in SGMLLinkExtractor and HtmlParserLinkExtractor (issue 485, issue 574)

  • Fix wrong checks on subclassing of deprecated classes (issue 581, issue 584)

  • Handle errors caused by inspect.stack() failures (issue 582)

  • Fix a reference to unexistent engine attribute (issue 593, issue 594)

  • Fix dynamic itemclass example usage of type() (issue 603)

  • Use lucasdemarchi/codespell to fix typos (issue 628)

  • Fix default value of attrs argument in SgmlLinkExtractor to be tuple (issue 661)

  • Fix XXE flaw in sitemap reader (issue 676)

  • Fix engine to support filtered start requests (issue 707)

  • Fix offsite middleware case on urls with no hostnames (issue 745)

  • Testsuite doesn’t require PIL anymore (issue 585)

Scrapy 0.22.2 (released 2014-02-14)

Scrapy 0.22.1 (released 2014-02-08)

  • localhost666 can resolve under certain circumstances (commit 2ec2279)

  • test inspect.stack failure (commit cc3eda3)

  • Handle cases when inspect.stack() fails (commit 8cb44f9)

  • Fix wrong checks on subclassing of deprecated classes. closes #581 (commit 46d98d6)

  • Docs: 4-space indent for final spider example (commit 13846de)

  • Fix HtmlParserLinkExtractor and tests after #485 merge (commit 368a946)

  • BaseSgmlLinkExtractor: Fixed the missing space when the link has an inner tag (commit b566388)

  • BaseSgmlLinkExtractor: Added unit test of a link with an inner tag (commit c1cb418)

  • BaseSgmlLinkExtractor: Fixed unknown_endtag() so that it only set current_link=None when the end tag match the opening tag (commit 7e4d627)

  • Fix tests for Travis-CI build (commit 76c7e20)

  • replace unencodable codepoints with html entities. fixes #562 and #285 (commit 5f87b17)

  • RegexLinkExtractor: encode URL unicode value when creating Links (commit d0ee545)

  • Updated the tutorial crawl output with latest output. (commit 8da65de)

  • Updated shell docs with the crawler reference and fixed the actual shell output. (commit 875b9ab)

  • PEP8 minor edits. (commit f89efaf)

  • Expose current crawler in the Scrapy shell. (commit 5349cec)

  • Unused re import and PEP8 minor edits. (commit 387f414)

  • Ignore None’s values when using the ItemLoader. (commit 0632546)

  • DOC Fixed HTTPCACHE_STORAGE typo in the default value which is now Filesystem instead Dbm. (commit cde9a8c)

  • show Ubuntu setup instructions as literal code (commit fb5c9c5)

  • Update Ubuntu installation instructions (commit 70fb105)

  • Merge pull request #550 from stray-leone/patch-1 (commit 6f70b6a)

  • modify the version of Scrapy Ubuntu package (commit 725900d)

  • fix 0.22.0 release date (commit af0219a)

  • fix typos in news.rst and remove (not released yet) header (commit b7f58f4)

Scrapy 0.22.0 (released 2014-01-17)

Enhancements

  • [Backward incompatible] Switched HTTPCacheMiddleware backend to filesystem (issue 541) To restore old backend set HTTPCACHE_STORAGE to scrapy.contrib.httpcache.DbmCacheStorage

  • Proxy https:// urls using CONNECT method (issue 392, issue 397)

  • Add a middleware to crawl ajax crawleable pages as defined by google (issue 343)

  • Rename scrapy.spider.BaseSpider to scrapy.spider.Spider (issue 510, issue 519)

  • Selectors register EXSLT namespaces by default (issue 472)

  • Unify item loaders similar to selectors renaming (issue 461)

  • Make RFPDupeFilter class easily subclassable (issue 533)

  • Improve test coverage and forthcoming Python 3 support (issue 525)

  • Promote startup info on settings and middleware to INFO level (issue 520)

  • Support partials in get_func_args util (issue 506, issue:504)

  • Allow running individual tests via tox (issue 503)

  • Update extensions ignored by link extractors (issue 498)

  • Add middleware methods to get files/images/thumbs paths (issue 490)

  • Improve offsite middleware tests (issue 478)

  • Add a way to skip default Referer header set by RefererMiddleware (issue 475)

  • Do not send x-gzip in default Accept-Encoding header (issue 469)

  • Support defining http error handling using settings (issue 466)

  • Use modern python idioms wherever you find legacies (issue 497)

  • Improve and correct documentation (issue 527, issue 524, issue 521, issue 517, issue 512, issue 505, issue 502, issue 489, issue 465, issue 460, issue 425, issue 536)

Fixes

  • Update Selector class imports in CrawlSpider template (issue 484)

  • Fix unexistent reference to engine.slots (issue 464)

  • Do not try to call body_as_unicode() on a non-TextResponse instance (issue 462)

  • Warn when subclassing XPathItemLoader, previously it only warned on instantiation. (issue 523)

  • Warn when subclassing XPathSelector, previously it only warned on instantiation. (issue 537)

  • Multiple fixes to memory stats (issue 531, issue 530, issue 529)

  • Fix overriding url in FormRequest.from_response() (issue 507)

  • Fix tests runner under pip 1.5 (issue 513)

  • Fix logging error when spider name is unicode (issue 479)

Scrapy 0.20.2 (released 2013-12-09)

Scrapy 0.20.1 (released 2013-11-28)

  • include_package_data is required to build wheels from published sources (commit 5ba1ad5)

  • process_parallel was leaking the failures on its internal deferreds. closes #458 (commit 419a780)

Scrapy 0.20.0 (released 2013-11-08)

Enhancements

  • New Selector’s API including CSS selectors (issue 395 and issue 426),

  • Request/Response url/body attributes are now immutable (modifying them had been deprecated for a long time)

  • ITEM_PIPELINES is now defined as a dict (instead of a list)

  • Sitemap spider can fetch alternate URLs (issue 360)

  • Selector.remove_namespaces() now remove namespaces from element’s attributes. (issue 416)

  • Paved the road for Python 3.3+ (issue 435, issue 436, issue 431, issue 452)

  • New item exporter using native python types with nesting support (issue 366)

  • Tune HTTP1.1 pool size so it matches concurrency defined by settings (commit b43b5f575)

  • scrapy.mail.MailSender now can connect over TLS or upgrade using STARTTLS (issue 327)

  • New FilesPipeline with functionality factored out from ImagesPipeline (issue 370, issue 409)

  • Recommend Pillow instead of PIL for image handling (issue 317)

  • Added Debian packages for Ubuntu Quantal and Raring (commit 86230c0)

  • Mock server (used for tests) can listen for HTTPS requests (issue 410)

  • Remove multi spider support from multiple core components (issue 422, issue 421, issue 420, issue 419, issue 423, issue 418)

  • Travis-CI now tests Scrapy changes against development versions of w3lib and queuelib python packages.

  • Add pypy 2.1 to continuous integration tests (commit ecfa7431)

  • Pylinted, pep8 and removed old-style exceptions from source (issue 430, issue 432)

  • Use importlib for parametric imports (issue 445)

  • Handle a regression introduced in Python 2.7.5 that affects XmlItemExporter (issue 372)

  • Bugfix crawling shutdown on SIGINT (issue 450)

  • Do not submit reset type inputs in FormRequest.from_response (commit b326b87)

  • Do not silence download errors when request errback raises an exception (commit 684cfc0)

Bugfixes

Other

  • Dropped Python 2.6 support (issue 448)

  • Add cssselect python package as install dependency

  • Drop libxml2 and multi selector’s backend support, lxml is required from now on.

  • Minimum Twisted version increased to 10.0.0, dropped Twisted 8.0 support.

  • Running test suite now requires mock python library (issue 390)

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who contribute to this release!

List of contributors sorted by number of commits:

  1. 69 Daniel Graña <dangra@...>
  2. 37 Pablo Hoffman <pablo@...>
  3. 13 Mikhail Korobov <kmike84@...>
  4.  9 Alex Cepoi <alex.cepoi@...>
  5.  9 alexanderlukanin13 <alexander.lukanin.13@...>
  6.  8 Rolando Espinoza La fuente <darkrho@...>
  7.  8 Lukasz Biedrycki <lukasz.biedrycki@...>
  8.  6 Nicolas Ramirez <nramirez.uy@...>
  9.  3 Paul Tremberth <paul.tremberth@...>
  10.  2 Martin Olveyra <molveyra@...>
  11.  2 Stefan <misc@...>
  12.  2 Rolando Espinoza <darkrho@...>
  13.  2 Loren Davie <loren@...>
  14.  2 irgmedeiros <irgmedeiros@...>
  15.  1 Stefan Koch <taikano@...>
  16.  1 Stefan <cct@...>
  17.  1 scraperdragon <dragon@...>
  18.  1 Kumara Tharmalingam <ktharmal@...>
  19.  1 Francesco Piccinno <stack.box@...>
  20.  1 Marcos Campal <duendex@...>
  21.  1 Dragon Dave <dragon@...>
  22.  1 Capi Etheriel <barraponto@...>
  23.  1 cacovsky <amarquesferraz@...>
  24.  1 Berend Iwema <berend@...>

Scrapy 0.18.4 (released 2013-10-10)

  • IPython refuses to update the namespace. fix #396 (commit 3d32c4f)

  • Fix AlreadyCalledError replacing a request in shell command. closes #407 (commit b1d8919)

  • Fix start_requests laziness and early hangs (commit 89faf52)

Scrapy 0.18.3 (released 2013-10-03)

Scrapy 0.18.2 (released 2013-09-03)

  • Backport scrapy check command fixes and backward compatible multi crawler process(issue 339)

Scrapy 0.18.1 (released 2013-08-27)

  • remove extra import added by cherry picked changes (commit d20304e)

  • fix crawling tests under twisted pre 11.0.0 (commit 1994f38)

  • py26 can not format zero length fields {} (commit abf756f)

  • test PotentiaDataLoss errors on unbound responses (commit b15470d)

  • Treat responses without content-length or Transfer-Encoding as good responses (commit c4bf324)

  • do no include ResponseFailed if http11 handler is not enabled (commit 6cbe684)

  • New HTTP client wraps connection lost in ResponseFailed exception. fix #373 (commit 1a20bba)

  • limit travis-ci build matrix (commit 3b01bb8)

  • Merge pull request #375 from peterarenot/patch-1 (commit fa766d7)

  • Fixed so it refers to the correct folder (commit 3283809)

  • added Quantal & Raring to support Ubuntu releases (commit 1411923)

  • fix retry middleware which didn’t retry certain connection errors after the upgrade to http1 client, closes GH-373 (commit bb35ed0)

  • fix XmlItemExporter in Python 2.7.4 and 2.7.5 (commit de3e451)

  • minor updates to 0.18 release notes (commit c45e5f1)

  • fix contributors list format (commit 0b60031)

Scrapy 0.18.0 (released 2013-08-09)

  • Lot of improvements to testsuite run using Tox, including a way to test on pypi

  • Handle GET parameters for AJAX crawleable urls (commit 3fe2a32)

  • Use lxml recover option to parse sitemaps (issue 347)

  • Bugfix cookie merging by hostname and not by netloc (issue 352)

  • Support disabling HttpCompressionMiddleware using a flag setting (issue 359)

  • Support xml namespaces using iternodes parser in XMLFeedSpider (issue 12)

  • Support dont_cache request meta flag (issue 19)

  • Bugfix scrapy.utils.gz.gunzip broken by changes in python 2.7.4 (commit 4dc76e)

  • Bugfix url encoding on SgmlLinkExtractor (issue 24)

  • Bugfix TakeFirst processor shouldn’t discard zero (0) value (issue 59)

  • Support nested items in xml exporter (issue 66)

  • Improve cookies handling performance (issue 77)

  • Log dupe filtered requests once (issue 105)

  • Split redirection middleware into status and meta based middlewares (issue 78)

  • Use HTTP1.1 as default downloader handler (issue 109 and issue 318)

  • Support xpath form selection on FormRequest.from_response (issue 185)

  • Bugfix unicode decoding error on SgmlLinkExtractor (issue 199)

  • Bugfix signal dispatching on pypi interpreter (issue 205)

  • Improve request delay and concurrency handling (issue 206)

  • Add RFC2616 cache policy to HttpCacheMiddleware (issue 212)

  • Allow customization of messages logged by engine (issue 214)

  • Multiples improvements to DjangoItem (issue 217, issue 218, issue 221)

  • Extend Scrapy commands using setuptools entry points (issue 260)

  • Allow spider allowed_domains value to be set/tuple (issue 261)

  • Support settings.getdict (issue 269)

  • Simplify internal scrapy.core.scraper slot handling (issue 271)

  • Added Item.copy (issue 290)

  • Collect idle downloader slots (issue 297)

  • Add ftp:// scheme downloader handler (issue 329)

  • Added downloader benchmark webserver and spider tools Benchmarking

  • Moved persistent (on disk) queues to a separate project (queuelib) which Scrapy now depends on

  • Add Scrapy commands using external libraries (issue 260)

  • Added --pdb option to scrapy command line tool

  • Added XPathSelector.remove_namespaces which allows to remove all namespaces from XML documents for convenience (to work with namespace-less XPaths). Documented in Selectors.

  • Several improvements to spider contracts

  • New default middleware named MetaRefreshMiddldeware that handles meta-refresh html tag redirections,

  • MetaRefreshMiddldeware and RedirectMiddleware have different priorities to address #62

  • added from_crawler method to spiders

  • added system tests with mock server

  • more improvements to macOS compatibility (thanks Alex Cepoi)

  • several more cleanups to singletons and multi-spider support (thanks Nicolas Ramirez)

  • support custom download slots

  • added –spider option to “shell” command.

  • log overridden settings when Scrapy starts

Thanks to everyone who contribute to this release. Here is a list of contributors sorted by number of commits:

  1. 130 Pablo Hoffman <pablo@...>
  2.  97 Daniel Graña <dangra@...>
  3.  20 Nicolás Ramírez <nramirez.uy@...>
  4.  13 Mikhail Korobov <kmike84@...>
  5.  12 Pedro Faustino <pedrobandim@...>
  6.  11 Steven Almeroth <sroth77@...>
  7.   5 Rolando Espinoza La fuente <darkrho@...>
  8.   4 Michal Danilak <mimino.coder@...>
  9.   4 Alex Cepoi <alex.cepoi@...>
  10.   4 Alexandr N Zamaraev (aka tonal) <tonal@...>
  11.   3 paul <paul.tremberth@...>
  12.   3 Martin Olveyra <molveyra@...>
  13.   3 Jordi Llonch <llonchj@...>
  14.   3 arijitchakraborty <myself.arijit@...>
  15.   2 Shane Evans <shane.evans@...>
  16.   2 joehillen <joehillen@...>
  17.   2 Hart <HartSimha@...>
  18.   2 Dan <ellisd23@...>
  19.   1 Zuhao Wan <wanzuhao@...>
  20.   1 whodatninja <blake@...>
  21.   1 vkrest <v.krestiannykov@...>
  22.   1 tpeng <pengtaoo@...>
  23.   1 Tom Mortimer-Jones <tom@...>
  24.   1 Rocio Aramberri <roschegel@...>
  25.   1 Pedro <pedro@...>
  26.   1 notsobad <wangxiaohugg@...>
  27.   1 Natan L <kuyanatan.nlao@...>
  28.   1 Mark Grey <mark.grey@...>
  29.   1 Luan <luanpab@...>
  30.   1 Libor Nenadál <libor.nenadal@...>
  31.   1 Juan M Uys <opyate@...>
  32.   1 Jonas Brunsgaard <jonas.brunsgaard@...>
  33.   1 Ilya Baryshev <baryshev@...>
  34.   1 Hasnain Lakhani <m.hasnain.lakhani@...>
  35.   1 Emanuel Schorsch <emschorsch@...>
  36.   1 Chris Tilden <chris.tilden@...>
  37.   1 Capi Etheriel <barraponto@...>
  38.   1 cacovsky <amarquesferraz@...>
  39.   1 Berend Iwema <berend@...>

Scrapy 0.16.5 (released 2013-05-30)

  • obey request method when Scrapy deploy is redirected to a new endpoint (commit 8c4fcee)

  • fix inaccurate downloader middleware documentation. refs #280 (commit 40667cb)

  • doc: remove links to diveintopython.org, which is no longer available. closes #246 (commit bd58bfa)

  • Find form nodes in invalid html5 documents (commit e3d6945)

  • Fix typo labeling attrs type bool instead of list (commit a274276)

Scrapy 0.16.4 (released 2013-01-23)

  • fixes spelling errors in documentation (commit 6d2b3aa)

  • add doc about disabling an extension. refs #132 (commit c90de33)

  • Fixed error message formatting. log.err() doesn’t support cool formatting and when error occurred, the message was: “ERROR: Error processing %(item)s” (commit c16150c)

  • lint and improve images pipeline error logging (commit 56b45fc)

  • fixed doc typos (commit 243be84)

  • add documentation topics: Broad Crawls & Common Practices (commit 1fbb715)

  • fix bug in Scrapy parse command when spider is not specified explicitly. closes #209 (commit c72e682)

  • Update docs/topics/commands.rst (commit 28eac7a)

Scrapy 0.16.3 (released 2012-12-07)

Scrapy 0.16.2 (released 2012-11-09)

Scrapy 0.16.1 (released 2012-10-26)

  • fixed LogStats extension, which got broken after a wrong merge before the 0.16 release (commit 8c780fd)

  • better backward compatibility for scrapy.conf.settings (commit 3403089)

  • extended documentation on how to access crawler stats from extensions (commit c4da0b5)

  • removed .hgtags (no longer needed now that Scrapy uses git) (commit d52c188)

  • fix dashes under rst headers (commit fa4f7f9)

  • set release date for 0.16.0 in news (commit e292246)

Scrapy 0.16.0 (released 2012-10-18)

Scrapy changes:

  • added Spiders Contracts, a mechanism for testing spiders in a formal/reproducible way

  • added options -o and -t to the runspider command

  • documented AutoThrottle extension and added to extensions installed by default. You still need to enable it with AUTOTHROTTLE_ENABLED

  • major Stats Collection refactoring: removed separation of global/per-spider stats, removed stats-related signals (stats_spider_opened, etc). Stats are much simpler now, backward compatibility is kept on the Stats Collector API and signals.

  • added process_start_requests() method to spider middlewares

  • dropped Signals singleton. Signals should now be accessed through the Crawler.signals attribute. See the signals documentation for more info.

  • dropped Stats Collector singleton. Stats can now be accessed through the Crawler.stats attribute. See the stats collection documentation for more info.

  • documented Core API

  • lxml is now the default selectors backend instead of libxml2

  • ported FormRequest.from_response() to use lxml instead of ClientForm

  • removed modules: scrapy.xlib.BeautifulSoup and scrapy.xlib.ClientForm

  • SitemapSpider: added support for sitemap urls ending in .xml and .xml.gz, even if they advertise a wrong content type (commit 10ed28b)

  • StackTraceDump extension: also dump trackref live references (commit fe2ce93)

  • nested items now fully supported in JSON and JSONLines exporters

  • added cookiejar Request meta key to support multiple cookie sessions per spider

  • decoupled encoding detection code to w3lib.encoding, and ported Scrapy code to use that module

  • dropped support for Python 2.5. See https://blog.scrapinghub.com/2012/02/27/scrapy-0-15-dropping-support-for-python-2-5/

  • dropped support for Twisted 2.5

  • added REFERER_ENABLED setting, to control referer middleware

  • changed default user agent to: Scrapy/VERSION (+http://scrapy.org)

  • removed (undocumented) HTMLImageLinkExtractor class from scrapy.contrib.linkextractors.image

  • removed per-spider settings (to be replaced by instantiating multiple crawler objects)

  • USER_AGENT spider attribute will no longer work, use user_agent attribute instead

  • DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT spider attribute will no longer work, use download_timeout attribute instead

  • removed ENCODING_ALIASES setting, as encoding auto-detection has been moved to the w3lib library

  • promoted DjangoItem to main contrib

  • LogFormatter method now return dicts(instead of strings) to support lazy formatting (issue 164, commit dcef7b0)

  • downloader handlers (DOWNLOAD_HANDLERS setting) now receive settings as the first argument of the __init__ method

  • replaced memory usage acounting with (more portable) resource module, removed scrapy.utils.memory module

  • removed signal: scrapy.mail.mail_sent

  • removed TRACK_REFS setting, now trackrefs is always enabled

  • DBM is now the default storage backend for HTTP cache middleware

  • number of log messages (per level) are now tracked through Scrapy stats (stat name: log_count/LEVEL)

  • number received responses are now tracked through Scrapy stats (stat name: response_received_count)

  • removed scrapy.log.started attribute

Scrapy 0.14.4

Scrapy 0.14.3

  • forgot to include pydispatch license. #118 (commit fd85f9c)

  • include egg files used by testsuite in source distribution. #118 (commit c897793)

  • update docstring in project template to avoid confusion with genspider command, which may be considered as an advanced feature. refs #107 (commit 2548dcc)

  • added note to docs/topics/firebug.rst about google directory being shut down (commit 668e352)

  • don’t discard slot when empty, just save in another dict in order to recycle if needed again. (commit 8e9f607)

  • do not fail handling unicode xpaths in libxml2 backed selectors (commit b830e95)

  • fixed minor mistake in Request objects documentation (commit bf3c9ee)

  • fixed minor defect in link extractors documentation (commit ba14f38)

  • removed some obsolete remaining code related to sqlite support in Scrapy (commit 0665175)

Scrapy 0.14.2

  • move buffer pointing to start of file before computing checksum. refs #92 (commit 6a5bef2)

  • Compute image checksum before persisting images. closes #92 (commit 9817df1)

  • remove leaking references in cached failures (commit 673a120)

  • fixed bug in MemoryUsage extension: get_engine_status() takes exactly 1 argument (0 given) (commit 11133e9)

  • fixed struct.error on http compression middleware. closes #87 (commit 1423140)

  • ajax crawling wasn’t expanding for unicode urls (commit 0de3fb4)

  • Catch start_requests iterator errors. refs #83 (commit 454a21d)

  • Speed-up libxml2 XPathSelector (commit 2fbd662)

  • updated versioning doc according to recent changes (commit 0a070f5)

  • scrapyd: fixed documentation link (commit 2b4e4c3)

  • extras/makedeb.py: no longer obtaining version from git (commit caffe0e)

Scrapy 0.14.1

  • extras/makedeb.py: no longer obtaining version from git (commit caffe0e)

  • bumped version to 0.14.1 (commit 6cb9e1c)

  • fixed reference to tutorial directory (commit 4b86bd6)

  • doc: removed duplicated callback argument from Request.replace() (commit 1aeccdd)

  • fixed formatting of scrapyd doc (commit 8bf19e6)

  • Dump stacks for all running threads and fix engine status dumped by StackTraceDump extension (commit 14a8e6e)

  • added comment about why we disable ssl on boto images upload (commit 5223575)

  • SSL handshaking hangs when doing too many parallel connections to S3 (commit 63d583d)

  • change tutorial to follow changes on dmoz site (commit bcb3198)

  • Avoid _disconnectedDeferred AttributeError exception in Twisted>=11.1.0 (commit 98f3f87)

  • allow spider to set autothrottle max concurrency (commit 175a4b5)

Scrapy 0.14

New features and settings

  • Support for AJAX crawleable urls

  • New persistent scheduler that stores requests on disk, allowing to suspend and resume crawls (r2737)

  • added -o option to scrapy crawl, a shortcut for dumping scraped items into a file (or standard output using -)

  • Added support for passing custom settings to Scrapyd schedule.json api (r2779, r2783)

  • New ChunkedTransferMiddleware (enabled by default) to support chunked transfer encoding (r2769)

  • Add boto 2.0 support for S3 downloader handler (r2763)

  • Added marshal to formats supported by feed exports (r2744)

  • In request errbacks, offending requests are now received in failure.request attribute (r2738)

  • Big downloader refactoring to support per domain/ip concurrency limits (r2732)

  • Added builtin caching DNS resolver (r2728)

  • Moved Amazon AWS-related components/extensions (SQS spider queue, SimpleDB stats collector) to a separate project: [scaws](https://github.com/scrapinghub/scaws) (r2706, r2714)

  • Moved spider queues to scrapyd: scrapy.spiderqueue -> scrapyd.spiderqueue (r2708)

  • Moved sqlite utils to scrapyd: scrapy.utils.sqlite -> scrapyd.sqlite (r2781)

  • Real support for returning iterators on start_requests() method. The iterator is now consumed during the crawl when the spider is getting idle (r2704)

  • Added REDIRECT_ENABLED setting to quickly enable/disable the redirect middleware (r2697)

  • Added RETRY_ENABLED setting to quickly enable/disable the retry middleware (r2694)

  • Added CloseSpider exception to manually close spiders (r2691)

  • Improved encoding detection by adding support for HTML5 meta charset declaration (r2690)

  • Refactored close spider behavior to wait for all downloads to finish and be processed by spiders, before closing the spider (r2688)

  • Added SitemapSpider (see documentation in Spiders page) (r2658)

  • Added LogStats extension for periodically logging basic stats (like crawled pages and scraped items) (r2657)

  • Make handling of gzipped responses more robust (#319, r2643). Now Scrapy will try and decompress as much as possible from a gzipped response, instead of failing with an IOError.

  • Simplified !MemoryDebugger extension to use stats for dumping memory debugging info (r2639)

  • Added new command to edit spiders: scrapy edit (r2636) and -e flag to genspider command that uses it (r2653)

  • Changed default representation of items to pretty-printed dicts. (r2631). This improves default logging by making log more readable in the default case, for both Scraped and Dropped lines.

  • Added spider_error signal (r2628)

  • Added COOKIES_ENABLED setting (r2625)

  • Stats are now dumped to Scrapy log (default value of STATS_DUMP setting has been changed to True). This is to make Scrapy users more aware of Scrapy stats and the data that is collected there.

  • Added support for dynamically adjusting download delay and maximum concurrent requests (r2599)

  • Added new DBM HTTP cache storage backend (r2576)

  • Added listjobs.json API to Scrapyd (r2571)

  • CsvItemExporter: added join_multivalued parameter (r2578)

  • Added namespace support to xmliter_lxml (r2552)

  • Improved cookies middleware by making COOKIES_DEBUG nicer and documenting it (r2579)

  • Several improvements to Scrapyd and Link extractors

Code rearranged and removed

  • Merged item passed and item scraped concepts, as they have often proved confusing in the past. This means: (r2630)

    • original item_scraped signal was removed

    • original item_passed signal was renamed to item_scraped

    • old log lines Scraped Item... were removed

    • old log lines Passed Item... were renamed to Scraped Item... lines and downgraded to DEBUG level

  • Reduced Scrapy codebase by striping part of Scrapy code into two new libraries:

    • w3lib (several functions from scrapy.utils.{http,markup,multipart,response,url}, done in r2584)

    • scrapely (was scrapy.contrib.ibl, done in r2586)

  • Removed unused function: scrapy.utils.request.request_info() (r2577)

  • Removed googledir project from examples/googledir. There’s now a new example project called dirbot available on GitHub: https://github.com/scrapy/dirbot

  • Removed support for default field values in Scrapy items (r2616)

  • Removed experimental crawlspider v2 (r2632)

  • Removed scheduler middleware to simplify architecture. Duplicates filter is now done in the scheduler itself, using the same dupe fltering class as before (DUPEFILTER_CLASS setting) (r2640)

  • Removed support for passing urls to scrapy crawl command (use scrapy parse instead) (r2704)

  • Removed deprecated Execution Queue (r2704)

  • Removed (undocumented) spider context extension (from scrapy.contrib.spidercontext) (r2780)

  • removed CONCURRENT_SPIDERS setting (use scrapyd maxproc instead) (r2789)

  • Renamed attributes of core components: downloader.sites -> downloader.slots, scraper.sites -> scraper.slots (r2717, r2718)

  • Renamed setting CLOSESPIDER_ITEMPASSED to CLOSESPIDER_ITEMCOUNT (r2655). Backward compatibility kept.

Scrapy 0.12

The numbers like #NNN reference tickets in the old issue tracker (Trac) which is no longer available.

New features and improvements

  • Passed item is now sent in the item argument of the item_passed (#273)

  • Added verbose option to scrapy version command, useful for bug reports (#298)

  • HTTP cache now stored by default in the project data dir (#279)

  • Added project data storage directory (#276, #277)

  • Documented file structure of Scrapy projects (see command-line tool doc)

  • New lxml backend for XPath selectors (#147)

  • Per-spider settings (#245)

  • Support exit codes to signal errors in Scrapy commands (#248)

  • Added -c argument to scrapy shell command

  • Made libxml2 optional (#260)

  • New deploy command (#261)

  • Added CLOSESPIDER_PAGECOUNT setting (#253)

  • Added CLOSESPIDER_ERRORCOUNT setting (#254)

Scrapyd changes

  • Scrapyd now uses one process per spider

  • It stores one log file per spider run, and rotate them keeping the lastest 5 logs per spider (by default)

  • A minimal web ui was added, available at http://localhost:6800 by default

  • There is now a scrapy server command to start a Scrapyd server of the current project

Changes to settings

  • added HTTPCACHE_ENABLED setting (False by default) to enable HTTP cache middleware

  • changed HTTPCACHE_EXPIRATION_SECS semantics: now zero means “never expire”.

Deprecated/obsoleted functionality

  • Deprecated runserver command in favor of server command which starts a Scrapyd server. See also: Scrapyd changes

  • Deprecated queue command in favor of using Scrapyd schedule.json API. See also: Scrapyd changes

  • Removed the !LxmlItemLoader (experimental contrib which never graduated to main contrib)

Scrapy 0.10

The numbers like #NNN reference tickets in the old issue tracker (Trac) which is no longer available.

New features and improvements

  • New Scrapy service called scrapyd for deploying Scrapy crawlers in production (#218) (documentation available)

  • Simplified Images pipeline usage which doesn’t require subclassing your own images pipeline now (#217)

  • Scrapy shell now shows the Scrapy log by default (#206)

  • Refactored execution queue in a common base code and pluggable backends called “spider queues” (#220)

  • New persistent spider queue (based on SQLite) (#198), available by default, which allows to start Scrapy in server mode and then schedule spiders to run.

  • Added documentation for Scrapy command-line tool and all its available sub-commands. (documentation available)

  • Feed exporters with pluggable backends (#197) (documentation available)

  • Deferred signals (#193)

  • Added two new methods to item pipeline open_spider(), close_spider() with deferred support (#195)

  • Support for overriding default request headers per spider (#181)

  • Replaced default Spider Manager with one with similar functionality but not depending on Twisted Plugins (#186)

  • Splitted Debian package into two packages - the library and the service (#187)

  • Scrapy log refactoring (#188)

  • New extension for keeping persistent spider contexts among different runs (#203)

  • Added dont_redirect request.meta key for avoiding redirects (#233)

  • Added dont_retry request.meta key for avoiding retries (#234)

Command-line tool changes

  • New scrapy command which replaces the old scrapy-ctl.py (#199) - there is only one global scrapy command now, instead of one scrapy-ctl.py per project - Added scrapy.bat script for running more conveniently from Windows

  • Added bash completion to command-line tool (#210)

  • Renamed command start to runserver (#209)

API changes

  • url and body attributes of Request objects are now read-only (#230)

  • Request.copy() and Request.replace() now also copies their callback and errback attributes (#231)

  • Removed UrlFilterMiddleware from scrapy.contrib (already disabled by default)

  • Offsite middelware doesn’t filter out any request coming from a spider that doesn’t have a allowed_domains attribute (#225)

  • Removed Spider Manager load() method. Now spiders are loaded in the __init__ method itself.

  • Changes to Scrapy Manager (now called “Crawler”):

    • scrapy.core.manager.ScrapyManager class renamed to scrapy.crawler.Crawler

    • scrapy.core.manager.scrapymanager singleton moved to scrapy.project.crawler

  • Moved module: scrapy.contrib.spidermanager to scrapy.spidermanager

  • Spider Manager singleton moved from scrapy.spider.spiders to the spiders` attribute of ``scrapy.project.crawler singleton.

  • moved Stats Collector classes: (#204)

    • scrapy.stats.collector.StatsCollector to scrapy.statscol.StatsCollector

    • scrapy.stats.collector.SimpledbStatsCollector to scrapy.contrib.statscol.SimpledbStatsCollector

  • default per-command settings are now specified in the default_settings attribute of command object class (#201)

  • changed arguments of Item pipeline process_item() method from (spider, item) to (item, spider)

    • backward compatibility kept (with deprecation warning)

  • moved scrapy.core.signals module to scrapy.signals

    • backward compatibility kept (with deprecation warning)

  • moved scrapy.core.exceptions module to scrapy.exceptions

    • backward compatibility kept (with deprecation warning)

  • added handles_request() class method to BaseSpider

  • dropped scrapy.log.exc() function (use scrapy.log.err() instead)

  • dropped component argument of scrapy.log.msg() function

  • dropped scrapy.log.log_level attribute

  • Added from_settings() class methods to Spider Manager, and Item Pipeline Manager

Changes to settings

  • Added HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_SCHEMES setting to ignore certain schemes on !HttpCacheMiddleware (#225)

  • Added SPIDER_QUEUE_CLASS setting which defines the spider queue to use (#220)

  • Added KEEP_ALIVE setting (#220)

  • Removed SERVICE_QUEUE setting (#220)

  • Removed COMMANDS_SETTINGS_MODULE setting (#201)

  • Renamed REQUEST_HANDLERS to DOWNLOAD_HANDLERS and make download handlers classes (instead of functions)

Scrapy 0.9

The numbers like #NNN reference tickets in the old issue tracker (Trac) which is no longer available.

New features and improvements

  • Added SMTP-AUTH support to scrapy.mail

  • New settings added: MAIL_USER, MAIL_PASS (r2065 | #149)

  • Added new scrapy-ctl view command - To view URL in the browser, as seen by Scrapy (r2039)

  • Added web service for controlling Scrapy process (this also deprecates the web console. (r2053 | #167)

  • Support for running Scrapy as a service, for production systems (r1988, r2054, r2055, r2056, r2057 | #168)

  • Added wrapper induction library (documentation only available in source code for now). (r2011)

  • Simplified and improved response encoding support (r1961, r1969)

  • Added LOG_ENCODING setting (r1956, documentation available)

  • Added RANDOMIZE_DOWNLOAD_DELAY setting (enabled by default) (r1923, doc available)

  • MailSender is no longer IO-blocking (r1955 | #146)

  • Linkextractors and new Crawlspider now handle relative base tag urls (r1960 | #148)

  • Several improvements to Item Loaders and processors (r2022, r2023, r2024, r2025, r2026, r2027, r2028, r2029, r2030)

  • Added support for adding variables to telnet console (r2047 | #165)

  • Support for requests without callbacks (r2050 | #166)

API changes

  • Change Spider.domain_name to Spider.name (SEP-012, r1975)

  • Response.encoding is now the detected encoding (r1961)

  • HttpErrorMiddleware now returns None or raises an exception (r2006 | #157)

  • scrapy.command modules relocation (r2035, r2036, r2037)

  • Added ExecutionQueue for feeding spiders to scrape (r2034)

  • Removed ExecutionEngine singleton (r2039)

  • Ported S3ImagesStore (images pipeline) to use boto and threads (r2033)

  • Moved module: scrapy.management.telnet to scrapy.telnet (r2047)

Changes to default settings

  • Changed default SCHEDULER_ORDER to DFO (r1939)

Scrapy 0.8

The numbers like #NNN reference tickets in the old issue tracker (Trac) which is no longer available.

New features

  • Added DEFAULT_RESPONSE_ENCODING setting (r1809)

  • Added dont_click argument to FormRequest.from_response() method (r1813, r1816)

  • Added clickdata argument to FormRequest.from_response() method (r1802, r1803)

  • Added support for HTTP proxies (HttpProxyMiddleware) (r1781, r1785)

  • Offsite spider middleware now logs messages when filtering out requests (r1841)

Backward-incompatible changes

  • Changed scrapy.utils.response.get_meta_refresh() signature (r1804)

  • Removed deprecated scrapy.item.ScrapedItem class - use scrapy.item.Item instead (r1838)

  • Removed deprecated scrapy.xpath module - use scrapy.selector instead. (r1836)

  • Removed deprecated core.signals.domain_open signal - use core.signals.domain_opened instead (r1822)

  • log.msg() now receives a spider argument (r1822)

    • Old domain argument has been deprecated and will be removed in 0.9. For spiders, you should always use the spider argument and pass spider references. If you really want to pass a string, use the component argument instead.

  • Changed core signals domain_opened, domain_closed, domain_idle

  • Changed Item pipeline to use spiders instead of domains

    • The domain argument of process_item() item pipeline method was changed to spider, the new signature is: process_item(spider, item) (r1827 | #105)

    • To quickly port your code (to work with Scrapy 0.8) just use spider.domain_name where you previously used domain.

  • Changed Stats API to use spiders instead of domains (r1849 | #113)

    • StatsCollector was changed to receive spider references (instead of domains) in its methods (set_value, inc_value, etc).

    • added StatsCollector.iter_spider_stats() method

    • removed StatsCollector.list_domains() method

    • Also, Stats signals were renamed and now pass around spider references (instead of domains). Here’s a summary of the changes:

    • To quickly port your code (to work with Scrapy 0.8) just use spider.domain_name where you previously used domain. spider_stats contains exactly the same data as domain_stats.

  • CloseDomain extension moved to scrapy.contrib.closespider.CloseSpider (r1833)

    • Its settings were also renamed:

      • CLOSEDOMAIN_TIMEOUT to CLOSESPIDER_TIMEOUT

      • CLOSEDOMAIN_ITEMCOUNT to CLOSESPIDER_ITEMCOUNT

  • Removed deprecated SCRAPYSETTINGS_MODULE environment variable - use SCRAPY_SETTINGS_MODULE instead (r1840)

  • Renamed setting: REQUESTS_PER_DOMAIN to CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_SPIDER (r1830, r1844)

  • Renamed setting: CONCURRENT_DOMAINS to CONCURRENT_SPIDERS (r1830)

  • Refactored HTTP Cache middleware

  • HTTP Cache middleware has been heavilty refactored, retaining the same functionality except for the domain sectorization which was removed. (r1843 )

  • Renamed exception: DontCloseDomain to DontCloseSpider (r1859 | #120)

  • Renamed extension: DelayedCloseDomain to SpiderCloseDelay (r1861 | #121)

  • Removed obsolete scrapy.utils.markup.remove_escape_chars function - use scrapy.utils.markup.replace_escape_chars instead (r1865)

Scrapy 0.7

First release of Scrapy.