Learn/Scrapy Framework Tutorial

Scrapy Framework Tutorial

Master Scrapy, the powerful Python web scraping framework. Learn to build production-grade spiders, process data with pipelines, and scale your scraping projects.

Intermediate
35 minutes
PythonScrapyWeb ScrapingFrameworkAdvanced
Quiz Score0 / 18 (0%)
Section 1 of 5

Introduction to Scrapy

What is Scrapy?

Scrapy is a fast, production-grade web scraping and crawling framework for Python. Unlike Beautiful Soup (a library), Scrapy is a complete framework with built-in features for large-scale scraping projects.

Framework vs Library

FeatureScrapy (Framework)Beautiful Soup (Library)
ArchitectureFull framework with structureParsing library only
Built-in FeaturesRequests, parsing, storage, schedulingHTML/XML parsing only
Concurrency✅ Async (Twisted)❌ Single-threaded
Data Pipeline✅ Built-in processing❌ Manual implementation
Learning CurveSteeper (more concepts)Gentle (simple API)
Use CaseLarge projects, crawlingSmall scripts, parsing

When to Use Scrapy

Choose Scrapy when:

  • Crawling multiple pages/sites at scale
  • Need concurrent requests (100s of pages)
  • Require data processing pipelines
  • Building production scrapers
  • Need middleware (proxies, user-agents, rate limiting)

Choose Beautiful Soup when:

  • Scraping single pages or small datasets
  • Quick one-off scripts
  • Only need HTML parsing
  • Beginner-friendly simple tasks

Key Concepts

  • Spider: Defines how to scrape a site (URLs, extraction logic)
  • Item: Structured data container (like a Python dataclass)
  • Pipeline: Processes/validates/stores scraped items
  • Middleware: Modifies requests/responses (headers, proxies)
  • Selectors: CSS/XPath for extracting data

Check Your Understanding

What is the main difference between Scrapy and Beautiful Soup?
What does a Scrapy Pipeline do?
When should you choose Scrapy over Beautiful Soup?

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