.. _topics-shell:

============
Scrapy shell
============

The Scrapy shell is an interactive shell where you can try and debug your
scraping code very quickly, without having to run the spider. It's meant to be
used for testing data extraction code, but you can actually use it for testing
any kind of code as it is also a regular Python shell.

The shell is used for testing XPath or CSS expressions and see how they work
and what data they extract from the web pages you're trying to scrape. It
allows you to interactively test your expressions while you're writing your
spider, without having to run the spider to test every change.

Once you get familiarized with the Scrapy shell, you'll see that it's an
invaluable tool for developing and debugging your spiders.

Configuring the shell
=====================

If you have `IPython`_ installed, the Scrapy shell will use it (instead of the
standard Python console). The `IPython`_ console is much more powerful and
provides smart auto-completion and colorized output, among other things.

We highly recommend you install `IPython`_, especially if you're working on
Unix systems (where `IPython`_ excels). See the `IPython installation guide`_
for more info.

Scrapy also has support for `bpython`_, and will try to use it where `IPython`_
is unavailable.

Through Scrapy's settings you can configure it to use any one of
``ipython``, ``bpython`` or the standard ``python`` shell, regardless of which
are installed. This is done by setting the ``SCRAPY_PYTHON_SHELL`` environment
variable; or by defining it in your :ref:`scrapy.cfg <topics-config-settings>`::

    [settings]
    shell = bpython

.. _IPython: https://ipython.org/
.. _IPython installation guide: https://ipython.org/install.html
.. _bpython: https://bpython-interpreter.org/

Launch the shell
================

To launch the Scrapy shell you can use the :command:`shell` command like
this::

    scrapy shell <url>

Where the ``<url>`` is the URL you want to scrape.

:command:`shell` also works for local files. This can be handy if you want
to play around with a local copy of a web page. :command:`shell` understands
the following syntaxes for local files::

    # UNIX-style
    scrapy shell ./path/to/file.html
    scrapy shell ../other/path/to/file.html
    scrapy shell /absolute/path/to/file.html

    # File URI
    scrapy shell file:///absolute/path/to/file.html

.. note:: When using relative file paths, be explicit and prepend them
    with ``./`` (or ``../`` when relevant).
    ``scrapy shell index.html`` will not work as one might expect (and
    this is by design, not a bug).

    Because :command:`shell` favors HTTP URLs over File URIs,
    and ``index.html`` being syntactically similar to ``example.com``,
    :command:`shell` will treat ``index.html`` as a domain name and trigger
    a DNS lookup error::

        $ scrapy shell index.html
        [ ... scrapy shell starts ... ]
        [ ... traceback ... ]
        twisted.internet.error.DNSLookupError: DNS lookup failed:
        address 'index.html' not found: [Errno -5] No address associated with hostname.

    :command:`shell` will not test beforehand if a file called ``index.html``
    exists in the current directory. Again, be explicit.


Using the shell
===============

The Scrapy shell is just a regular Python console (or `IPython`_ console if you
have it available) which provides some additional shortcut functions for
convenience.

Available Shortcuts
-------------------

-   ``shelp()`` - print a help with the list of available objects and
    shortcuts

-   ``fetch(url[, redirect=True])`` - fetch a new response from the given URL
    and update all related objects accordingly. You can optionally ask for HTTP
    3xx redirections to not be followed by passing ``redirect=False``

-   ``fetch(request)`` - fetch a new response from the given request and update
    all related objects accordingly.

-   ``view(response)`` - open the given response in your local web browser, for
    inspection. This will add a `\<base\> tag`_ to the response body in order
    for external links (such as images and style sheets) to display properly.
    Note, however, that this will create a temporary file in your computer,
    which won't be removed automatically.

.. _<base> tag: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/base

Available Scrapy objects
------------------------

The Scrapy shell automatically creates some convenient objects from the
downloaded page, like the :class:`~scrapy.http.Response` object and the
:class:`~scrapy.Selector` objects (for both HTML and XML
content).

Those objects are:

-    ``crawler`` - the current :class:`~scrapy.crawler.Crawler` object.

-   ``spider`` - the Spider which is known to handle the URL, or a
    :class:`~scrapy.Spider` object if there is no spider found for the
    current URL

-   ``request`` - a :class:`~scrapy.Request` object of the last fetched
    page. You can modify this request using
    :meth:`~scrapy.Request.replace` or fetch a new request (without
    leaving the shell) using the ``fetch`` shortcut.

-   ``response`` - a :class:`~scrapy.http.Response` object containing the last
    fetched page

-   ``settings`` - the current :ref:`Scrapy settings <topics-settings>`

Example of shell session
========================

.. skip: start

Here's an example of a typical shell session where we start by scraping the
https://scrapy.org page, and then proceed to scrape the https://old.reddit.com/
page. Finally, we modify the (Reddit) request method to POST and re-fetch it
getting an error. We end the session by typing Ctrl-D (in Unix systems) or
Ctrl-Z in Windows.

Keep in mind that the data extracted here may not be the same when you try it,
as those pages are not static and could have changed by the time you test this.
The only purpose of this example is to get you familiarized with how the Scrapy
shell works.

First, we launch the shell::

    scrapy shell 'https://scrapy.org' --nolog

.. note::

   Remember to always enclose URLs in quotes when running the Scrapy shell from
   the command line, otherwise URLs containing arguments (i.e. the ``&`` character)
   will not work.

   On Windows, use double quotes instead::

       scrapy shell "https://scrapy.org" --nolog


Then, the shell fetches the URL (using the Scrapy downloader) and prints the
list of available objects and useful shortcuts (you'll notice that these lines
all start with the ``[s]`` prefix)::

    [s] Available Scrapy objects:
    [s]   scrapy     scrapy module (contains scrapy.Request, scrapy.Selector, etc)
    [s]   crawler    <scrapy.crawler.Crawler object at 0x7f07395dd690>
    [s]   item       {}
    [s]   request    <GET https://scrapy.org>
    [s]   response   <200 https://scrapy.org/>
    [s]   settings   <scrapy.settings.Settings object at 0x7f07395dd710>
    [s]   spider     <DefaultSpider 'default' at 0x7f0735891690>
    [s] Useful shortcuts:
    [s]   fetch(url[, redirect=True]) Fetch URL and update local objects (by default, redirects are followed)
    [s]   fetch(req)                  Fetch a scrapy.Request and update local objects
    [s]   shelp()           Shell help (print this help)
    [s]   view(response)    View response in a browser

    >>>


After that, we can start playing with the objects:

.. code-block:: pycon

    >>> response.xpath("//title/text()").get()
    'Scrapy | A Fast and Powerful Scraping and Web Crawling Framework'

    >>> fetch("https://old.reddit.com/")

    >>> response.xpath("//title/text()").get()
    'reddit: the front page of the internet'

    >>> request = request.replace(method="POST")

    >>> fetch(request)

    >>> response.status
    404

    >>> from pprint import pprint

    >>> pprint(response.headers)
    {'Accept-Ranges': ['bytes'],
    'Cache-Control': ['max-age=0, must-revalidate'],
    'Content-Type': ['text/html; charset=UTF-8'],
    'Date': ['Thu, 08 Dec 2016 16:21:19 GMT'],
    'Server': ['snooserv'],
    'Set-Cookie': ['loid=KqNLou0V9SKMX4qb4n; Domain=reddit.com; Max-Age=63071999; Path=/; expires=Sat, 08-Dec-2018 16:21:19 GMT; secure',
                    'loidcreated=2016-12-08T16%3A21%3A19.445Z; Domain=reddit.com; Max-Age=63071999; Path=/; expires=Sat, 08-Dec-2018 16:21:19 GMT; secure',
                    'loid=vi0ZVe4NkxNWdlH7r7; Domain=reddit.com; Max-Age=63071999; Path=/; expires=Sat, 08-Dec-2018 16:21:19 GMT; secure',
                    'loidcreated=2016-12-08T16%3A21%3A19.459Z; Domain=reddit.com; Max-Age=63071999; Path=/; expires=Sat, 08-Dec-2018 16:21:19 GMT; secure'],
    'Vary': ['accept-encoding'],
    'Via': ['1.1 varnish'],
    'X-Cache': ['MISS'],
    'X-Cache-Hits': ['0'],
    'X-Content-Type-Options': ['nosniff'],
    'X-Frame-Options': ['SAMEORIGIN'],
    'X-Moose': ['majestic'],
    'X-Served-By': ['cache-cdg8730-CDG'],
    'X-Timer': ['S1481214079.394283,VS0,VE159'],
    'X-Ua-Compatible': ['IE=edge'],
    'X-Xss-Protection': ['1; mode=block']}

.. skip: end


.. _topics-shell-inspect-response:

Invoking the shell from spiders to inspect responses
====================================================

Sometimes you want to inspect the responses that are being processed in a
certain point of your spider, if only to check that response you expect is
getting there.

This can be achieved by using the ``scrapy.shell.inspect_response`` function.

Here's an example of how you would call it from your spider:

.. code-block:: python

    import scrapy


    class MySpider(scrapy.Spider):
        name = "myspider"
        start_urls = [
            "http://example.com",
            "http://example.org",
            "http://example.net",
        ]

        def parse(self, response):
            # We want to inspect one specific response.
            if ".org" in response.url:
                from scrapy.shell import inspect_response

                inspect_response(response, self)

            # Rest of parsing code.

.. skip: start

When you run the spider, you will get something similar to this::

    2014-01-23 17:48:31-0400 [scrapy.core.engine] DEBUG: Crawled (200) <GET http://example.com> (referer: None)
    2014-01-23 17:48:31-0400 [scrapy.core.engine] DEBUG: Crawled (200) <GET http://example.org> (referer: None)
    [s] Available Scrapy objects:
    [s]   crawler    <scrapy.crawler.Crawler object at 0x1e16b50>
    ...

    >>> response.url
    'http://example.org'

Then, you can check if the extraction code is working:

.. code-block:: pycon

    >>> response.xpath('//h1[@class="fn"]')
    []

Nope, it doesn't. So you can open the response in your web browser and see if
it's the response you were expecting:

.. code-block:: pycon

    >>> view(response)
    True

Finally you hit Ctrl-D (or Ctrl-Z in Windows) to exit the shell and resume the
crawling::

    >>> ^D
    2014-01-23 17:50:03-0400 [scrapy.core.engine] DEBUG: Crawled (200) <GET http://example.net> (referer: None)
    ...

.. skip: end

Note that you can't use the ``fetch`` shortcut here since the Scrapy engine is
blocked by the shell. However, after you leave the shell, the spider will
continue crawling where it stopped, as shown above.
