Scrapy is a powerful and popular web crawling and web scraping framework for Python. It allows you to extract data from websites efficiently and can be used for a wide range of purposes, including data mining, monitoring, and automated testing¹².

Installation and Setup

To get started with Scrapy, you need to install it using pip. It's recommended to create a virtual environment to isolate your project dependencies. Here are the steps:

1. Create a virtual environment: python3 -m venv myvenv source myvenv/bin/activate

2. Install Scrapy: pip install scrapy

3. Create a Scrapy project: scrapy startproject myproject cd myproject

Creating a Spider

A spider is a class that defines how to follow links and extract data from web pages. To create a spider, you need to subclass scrapy.Spider and define some attributes and methods.