.. _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 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 XPaths 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.

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

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

.. _IPython: http://ipython.scipy.org/
.. _IPython installation guide: http://ipython.scipy.org/doc/rel-0.9.1/html/install/index.html

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

To launch the shell type::

    scrapy-ctl.py shell <url>

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

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

The Scrapy shell is just a regular Python console (or `IPython` shell if you
have it available) which provides some additional functions available by
default (as shortcuts):

Built-in Shortcuts
------------------

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

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

 * ``view(response)`` - open the given response in your local web browser, for
   inspection. Note that this will generate a temporary file which won't be
   removed automatically.

Built-in 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.XPathSelector` objects (for both HTML and XML
content).

Those objects are:

 * ``url`` - the URL being analyzed

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

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

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

 * ``hxs`` - a :class:`~scrapy.selector.HtmlXPathSelector` object constructed
   with the last response fetched

 * ``xxs`` - a :class:`~scrapy.selector.XmlXPathSelector` object constructed
   with the last response fetched

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

Here's an example of a typical shell session where we start by scraping the
http://scrapy.org page, and then proceed to scrape the http://slashdot.org
page. Finally, we modify the (Slashdot) request method to POST and re-fetch it
getting a HTTP 405 (method not allowed) 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::

    python scrapy-ctl.py shell http://scrapy.org --nolog

Then, the shell fetches the url (using the Scrapy downloader) and prints the
list of available objects and some help::

    Fetching <http://scrapy.org>...
    Available objects
    =================

      xxs       : <XmlXPathSelector (http://scrapy.org) xpath=None>
      url       : http://scrapy.org
      request   : <http://scrapy.org>
      spider    : <scrapy.spider.models.BaseSpider object at 0x2bed9d0>
      hxs       : <HtmlXPathSelector (http://scrapy.org) xpath=None>
      item      : Item()
      response  : <http://scrapy.org>

    Available shortcuts
    ===================

      shelp()           : Prints this help.
      fetch(req_or_url) : Fetch a new request or URL and update objects
      view(response)    : View response in a browser

    Python 2.6.2 (release26-maint, Apr 19 2009, 01:58:18) 
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

    >>>

After that, we can stary playing with the objects::

    >>> hxs.select("//h2/text()").extract()[0]
    u'Welcome to Scrapy'
    >>> fetch("http://slashdot.org")
    Fetching <http://slashdot.org>...
    Done - use shelp() to see available objects
    >>> hxs.select("//h2/text()").extract()
    [u'News for nerds, stuff that matters']
    >>> request = request.replace(method="POST")
    >>> fetch(request)
    Fetching <POST http://slashdot.org>...
    2009-04-03 00:57:39-0300 [scrapybot] ERROR: Downloading <http://slashdot.org> from <None>: 405 Method Not Allowed
    >>>