Software:Scrapy

From HandWiki
Short description: Python web-crawling framework
Scrapy
Scrapy logo.jpg
Developer(s)Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub)
Initial release26 June 2008 (2008-06-26)
Written inPython
Operating systemWindows, macOS, Linux
TypeWeb crawler
LicenseBSD License

Scrapy (/ˈskrp/[1] SKRAY-peye) is a free and open-source web-crawling framework written in Python. Originally designed for web scraping, it can also be used to extract data using APIs or as a general-purpose web crawler.[2] It is currently maintained by Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub), a web-scraping development and services company.

Scrapy project architecture is built around "spiders", which are self-contained crawlers that are given a set of instructions. Following the spirit of other don't repeat yourself frameworks, such as Django,[3] it makes it easier to build and scale large crawling projects by allowing developers to reuse their code.

Some well-known companies and products using Scrapy are: Lyst,[4][5] Parse.ly,[6] Sayone Technologies,[7] Sciences Po Medialab,[8] Data.gov.uk’s World Government Data site.[9]

History

Scrapy was born at London-based web-aggregation and e-commerce company Mydeco, where it was developed and maintained by employees of Mydeco and Insophia (a web-consulting company based in Montevideo, Uruguay). The first public release was in August 2008 under the BSD license, with a milestone 1.0 release happening in June 2015.[10] In 2011, Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub) became the new official maintainer.[11][12]

References

  1. Commit 975f150
  2. Scrapy at a glance.
  3. "Frequently Asked Questions" (in en-US). http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/faq.html#did-scrapy-steal-x-from-django. 
  4. Bell, Eddie; Heusser, Jonathan. "Scalable Scraping Using Machine Learning". http://talks.lystit.com/dsl-scraping-presentation/#/4. 
  5. Scrapy | Companies using Scrapy
  6. Montalenti, Andrew (October 27, 2012). "Web Crawling & Metadata Extraction in Python" (in en-US). https://speakerdeck.com/amontalenti/web-crawling-and-metadata-extraction-in-python. 
  7. "Scrapy Companies". https://scrapy.org/companies/. 
  8. Hyphe v0.0.0: the first release of our new webcrawler is out!
  9. Ben Firshman [@bfirsh] (21 January 2010). "World Govt Data site uses Django, Solr, Haystack, Scrapy and other exciting buzzwords bit.ly/5jU3La #opendata #datastore". https://twitter.com/bfirsh/status/8025368963. 
  10. Medina, Julia (19 June 2015). "Scrapy 1.0 official release out!". scrapy-users (Mailing list).
  11. Hoffman, Pablo (2013) (in en-US). List of the primary authors & contributors. https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy/blob/master/AUTHORS. Retrieved 18 November 2013. 
  12. Interview Scraping Hub.