THE SCRAPINGHUB BLOG

Your spider is developed and we are getting our structured data daily, so our job is done, right?

Absolutely not! Website changes (sometimes very subtly), anti-bot countermeasures and temporary problems often reduce the quality and reliability of our data.

This is a guest post from the folks over at Intoli, one of the awesome companies providing Scrapy commercial support and longtime Scrapy fans.

Up until now, your deployment process using Scrapy Cloud has probably been something like this: code and test your spiders locally, commit and push your changes to a GitHub repository, and finally deploy them to Scrapy Cloud using shub deploy. However, having the development and the deployment processes in isolated steps might bring you some issues, such as unversioned and outdated code running...

Computers are great at repetitive tasks. They don't get distracted, bored, or tired. Automation is how you should be approaching tedious tasks that are absolutely essential to becoming a successful business or when carrying out mundane responsibilities. Price monitoring, for example, is a practice that every company should be doing, and is a task that readily lends itself to automation.

You can deploy, run, and maintain control over your Scrapy spiders in Scrapy Cloud, our production environment. Keeping control means you need to be able to know what’s going on with your spiders and to find out early if they are in trouble.

[UPDATE]: Please see this article for an up-to-date version.

The first rule of web crawling is you do not harm the website. The second rule of web crawling is you do NOT harm the website. We’re supporters of the democratization of web data, but not at the expense of the website’s owners.

It’s the end of an era. Python 2 is on its way out with only a few security and bug fixes forthcoming from now until its official retirement in 2020. Given this withdrawal of support and the fact that Python 3 has snazzier features, we are thrilled to announce that Scrapy Cloud now officially supports Python 3.

Welcome to Scrapy Tips from the Pros! In this monthly column, we share a few tricks and hacks to help speed up your web scraping activities. As the lead Scrapy maintainers, we’ve run into every obstacle you can imagine so don’t worry, you’re in great hands. Feel free to reach out to us on Twitter or Facebook with any suggestions for future topics.

Many governments worldwide have laws enforcing them to publish their expenses, contracts, decisions, and so forth, on the web. This is so the general public can monitor what their representatives are doing on their behalf.