Scrapyd-client

Scrapyd-client is a client for scrapyd. It provides the scrapyd-deploy utility which allows you to deploy your project to a Scrapyd server.

How It Works

Deploying your project to a Scrapyd server typically involves two steps:

1. Eggifying your project. You'll need to install setuptools for this. See Egg Caveats below.
2. Uploading the egg to the Scrapyd server through the addversion.json endpoint.

The scrapyd-deploy tool automates the process of building the egg and pushing it to the target Scrapyd server.

Targets

You can define Scrapyd targets in your project's scrapy.cfg file. Example:

[deploy:example]
url = http://scrapyd.example.com/api/scrapyd
username = scrapy
password = secret

While your target needs to be defined with its URL in scrapy.cfg, you can use netrc for username and password, like so:

machine scrapyd.example.com
    username scrapy
    password secret

If you want to list all available targets, you can use the -l option:

scrapyd-deploy -l

To list projects available on a specific target, use the -L option:

scrapyd-deploy -L example

Deploying a Project

First cd into your project's root, you can then deploy your project with the following:

scrapyd-deploy <target> -p <project>

This will eggify your project and upload it to the target. If you have a setup.py file in your project, it will be used, otherwise one will be created automatically.

If successful you should see a JSON response similar to the following:

Deploying myproject-1287453519 to http://localhost:6800/addversion.json
Server response (200):
{"status": "ok", "spiders": ["spider1", "spider2"]}

To save yourself from having to specify the target and project, you can set the defaults in the scrapy.cfg file:

[deploy]
url = http://scrapyd.example.com/api/scrapyd
username = scrapy
password = secret
project = yourproject

You can now deploy your project with just the following:

scrapyd-deploy

If you have more than one target to deploy, you can deploy your project in all targets with one command:

scrapyd-deploy -a -p <project>

Versioning

By default, scrapyd-deploy uses the current timestamp for generating the project version, as shown above. However, you can pass a custom version using --version:

scrapyd-deploy <target> -p <project> --version <version>

Or for all targets:

scrapyd-deploy -a -p <project> --version <version>

The version must be comparable with LooseVersion. Scrapyd will use the greatest version unless specified.

If you use Mercurial or Git, you can use HG or GIT respectively as the argument supplied to --version to use the current revision as the version. You can save yourself having to specify the version parameter by adding it to your target's entry in scrapy.cfg:

[deploy:target]
...
version = HG

Local Settings

You may want to keep certain settings local and not have them deployed to Scrapyd. To accomplish this you can create a local_settings.py file at the root of your project, where your scrapy.cfg file resides, and add the following to your project's settings:

try:
    from local_settings import *
except ImportError:
    pass

scrapyd-deploy doesn't deploy anything outside of the project module, so the local_settings.py file won't be deployed.

Egg Caveats

Some things to keep in mind when building eggs for your Scrapy project:

• Make sure no local development settings are included in the egg when you build it. The find_packages function may be picking up your custom settings. In most cases you want to upload the egg with the default project settings.
• You should avoid using __file__ in your project code as it doesn't play well with eggs. Consider using pkgutil.get_data() instead.
• Be careful when writing to disk in your project, as Scrapyd will most likely be running under a different user which may not have write access to certain directories. If you can, avoiding writing to disk and always use tempfile for temporary files.