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Installation and Setup

What is Scrapy?​

Scrapy is a free and open-source web crawling framework written in Python. It allows you to scrape and extract data from websites in a very efficient and fast way. In this tutorial, we will guide you through how to install and set up Scrapy on different operating systems including Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

Prerequisites​

Before we begin the installation, ensure you have Python 3.5 or above installed on your system. You can check your Python version by running the following command in your terminal:

python --version

If you don't have Python installed, you can download it from the official Python website.

Installing Scrapy​

Windows:​

  1. Install pip: Pip is a package manager for Python. It's used to install and manage software packages written in Python. If you have Python version 3.4 or above, pip is included by default.

  2. Install Scrapy: Open your command prompt and type the following command to install Scrapy:

pip install Scrapy

MacOS:​

  1. Install Homebrew: Homebrew is a package manager for macOS. You can install it using the following command in Terminal:
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
  1. Install Python3: You can install Python3 with the following command:
brew install python3
  1. Install Scrapy: Use the following command to install Scrapy:
pip3 install Scrapy

Linux:​

  1. Update packages: Before you install Scrapy, make sure your system packages are up to date by running:
sudo apt-get update
  1. Install Python3 and pip:
sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pip
  1. Install Scrapy:
pip3 install Scrapy

Verifying the Installation​

After the successful installation, you can confirm whether Scrapy is installed correctly or not by running:

scrapy version

If Scrapy is installed successfully, it should output the version of Scrapy installed on your system.

Conclusion​

You have successfully installed and set up Scrapy on your system. Now you are ready to create your first Scrapy project and start scraping. Happy Scraping!