Release notes¶

Enhancements¶

• Improve Scrapy top-level namespace (:issue:`494`, :issue:`684`)
• Add selector shortcuts to responses (:issue:`554`, :issue:`690`)
• Add new lxml based LinkExtractor to replace unmantained SgmlLinkExtractor (:issue:`559`, :issue:`761`, :issue:`763`)
• Cleanup settings API - part of per-spider settings GSoC project (:issue:`737`)
• Add UTF8 encoding header to templates (:issue:`688`, :issue:`762`)
• Telnet console now binds to 127.0.0.1 by default (:issue:`699`)
• Update debian/ubuntu install instructions (:issue:`509`, :issue:`549`)
• Disable smart strings in lxml XPath evaluations (:issue:`535`)
• Restore filesystem based cache as default for http cache middleware (:issue:`541`, :issue:`500`, :issue:`571`)
• Expose current crawler in Scrapy shell (:issue:`557`)
• Improve testsuite comparing CSV and XML exporters (:issue:`570`)
• New offsite/filtered and offsite/domains stats (:issue:`566`)
• Support process_links as generator in CrawlSpider (:issue:`555`)
• Verbose logging and new stats counters for DupeFilter (:issue:`553`)
• Add a mimetype parameter to MailSender.send() (:issue:`602`)
• Generalize file pipeline log messages (:issue:`622`)
• Replace unencodeable codepoints with html entities in SGMLLinkExtractor (:issue:`565`)
• Converted SEP documents to rst format (:issue:`629`, :issue:`630`, :issue:`638`, :issue:`632`, :issue:`636`, :issue:`640`, :issue:`635`, :issue:`634`, :issue:`639`, :issue:`637`, :issue:`631`, :issue:`633`, :issue:`641`, :issue:`642`)
• Tests and docs for clickdata’s nr index in FormRequest (:issue:`646`, :issue:`645`)
• Allow to disable a downloader handler just like any other component (:issue:`650`)
• Log when a request is discarded after too many redirections (:issue:`654`)
• Log error responses if they are not handled by spider callbacks (:issue:`612`, :issue:`656`)
• Add content-type check to http compression mw (:issue:`193`, :issue:`660`)
• Run pypy tests using latest pypi from ppa (:issue:`674`)
• Run test suite using pytest instead of trial (:issue:`679`)
• Build docs and check for dead links in tox environment (:issue:`687`)
• Make scrapy.version_info a tuple of integers (:issue:`681`, :issue:`692`)
• Infer exporter’s output format from filename extensions (:issue:`546`, :issue:`659`, :issue:`760`)
• Support case-insensitive domains in url_is_from_any_domain() (:issue:`693`)
• Remove pep8 warnings in project and spider templates (:issue:`698`)
• Tests and docs for request_fingerprint function (:issue:`597`)
• Update SEP-19 for GSoC project per-spider settings (:issue:`705`)
• Set exit code to non-zero when contracts fails (:issue:`727`)
• Add a setting to control what class is instanciated as Downloader component (:issue:`738`)
• Pass response in item_dropped signal (:issue:`724`)
• Improve scrapy check contracts command (:issue:`733`, :issue:`752`)
• Document spider.closed() shortcut (:issue:`719`)
• Document request_scheduled signal (:issue:`746`)
• Add a note about reporting security issues (:issue:`697`)
• Add LevelDB http cache storage backend (:issue:`626`, :issue:`500`)
• Sort spider list output of scrapy list command (:issue:`742`)
• Multiple documentation enhancemens and fixes (:issue:`575`, :issue:`587`, :issue:`590`, :issue:`596`, :issue:`610`, :issue:`617`, :issue:`618`, :issue:`627`, :issue:`613`, :issue:`643`, :issue:`654`, :issue:`675`, :issue:`663`, :issue:`711`, :issue:`714`)

Bugfixes¶

• Encode unicode URL value when creating Links in RegexLinkExtractor (:issue:`561`)
• Ignore None values in ItemLoader processors (:issue:`556`)
• Fix link text when there is an inner tag in SGMLLinkExtractor and HtmlParserLinkExtractor (:issue:`485`, :issue:`574`)
• Fix wrong checks on subclassing of deprecated classes (:issue:`581`, :issue:`584`)
• Handle errors caused by inspect.stack() failures (:issue:`582`)
• Fix a reference to unexistent engine attribute (:issue:`593`, :issue:`594`)
• Fix dynamic itemclass example usage of type() (:issue:`603`)
• Use lucasdemarchi/codespell to fix typos (:issue:`628`)
• Fix default value of attrs argument in SgmlLinkExtractor to be tuple (:issue:`661`)
• Fix XXE flaw in sitemap reader (:issue:`676`)
• Fix engine to support filtered start requests (:issue:`707`)
• Fix offsite middleware case on urls with no hostnames (:issue:`745`)
• Testsuite doesn’t require PIL anymore (:issue:`585`)

Enhancements¶

• [Backwards incompatible] Switched HTTPCacheMiddleware backend to filesystem (:issue:`541`) To restore old backend set HTTPCACHE_STORAGE to scrapy.contrib.httpcache.DbmCacheStorage
• Proxy https:// urls using CONNECT method (:issue:`392`, :issue:`397`)
• Add a middleware to crawl ajax crawleable pages as defined by google (:issue:`343`)
• Rename scrapy.spider.BaseSpider to scrapy.spider.Spider (:issue:`510`, :issue:`519`)
• Selectors register EXSLT namespaces by default (:issue:`472`)
• Unify item loaders similar to selectors renaming (:issue:`461`)
• Make RFPDupeFilter class easily subclassable (:issue:`533`)
• Improve test coverage and forthcoming Python 3 support (:issue:`525`)
• Promote startup info on settings and middleware to INFO level (:issue:`520`)
• Support partials in get_func_args util (:issue:`506`, issue:504)
• Allow running indiviual tests via tox (:issue:`503`)
• Update extensions ignored by link extractors (:issue:`498`)
• Add middleware methods to get files/images/thumbs paths (:issue:`490`)
• Improve offsite middleware tests (:issue:`478`)
• Add a way to skip default Referer header set by RefererMiddleware (:issue:`475`)
• Do not send x-gzip in default Accept-Encoding header (:issue:`469`)
• Support defining http error handling using settings (:issue:`466`)
• Use modern python idioms wherever you find legacies (:issue:`497`)
• Improve and correct documentation (:issue:`527`, :issue:`524`, :issue:`521`, :issue:`517`, :issue:`512`, :issue:`505`, :issue:`502`, :issue:`489`, :issue:`465`, :issue:`460`, :issue:`425`, :issue:`536`)

Fixes¶

• Update Selector class imports in CrawlSpider template (:issue:`484`)
• Fix unexistent reference to engine.slots (:issue:`464`)
• Do not try to call body_as_unicode() on a non-TextResponse instance (:issue:`462`)
• Warn when subclassing XPathItemLoader, previously it only warned on instantiation. (:issue:`523`)
• Warn when subclassing XPathSelector, previously it only warned on instantiation. (:issue:`537`)
• Multiple fixes to memory stats (:issue:`531`, :issue:`530`, :issue:`529`)
• Fix overriding url in FormRequest.from_response() (:issue:`507`)
• Fix tests runner under pip 1.5 (:issue:`513`)
• Fix logging error when spider name is unicode (:issue:`479`)

Enhancements¶

• New Selector’s API including CSS selectors (:issue:`395` and :issue:`426`),
• Request/Response url/body attributes are now immutable (modifying them had been deprecated for a long time)
• :setting:`ITEM_PIPELINES` is now defined as a dict (instead of a list)
• Sitemap spider can fetch alternate URLs (:issue:`360`)
• Selector.remove_namespaces() now remove namespaces from element’s attributes. (:issue:`416`)
• Paved the road for Python 3.3+ (:issue:`435`, :issue:`436`, :issue:`431`, :issue:`452`)
• New item exporter using native python types with nesting support (:issue:`366`)
• Tune HTTP1.1 pool size so it matches concurrency defined by settings (:commit:`b43b5f575`)
• scrapy.mail.MailSender now can connect over TLS or upgrade using STARTTLS (:issue:`327`)
• New FilesPipeline with functionality factored out from ImagesPipeline (:issue:`370`, :issue:`409`)
• Recommend Pillow instead of PIL for image handling (:issue:`317`)
• Added debian packages for Ubuntu quantal and raring (:commit:`86230c0`)
• Mock server (used for tests) can listen for HTTPS requests (:issue:`410`)
• Remove multi spider support from multiple core components (:issue:`422`, :issue:`421`, :issue:`420`, :issue:`419`, :issue:`423`, :issue:`418`)
• Travis-CI now tests Scrapy changes against development versions of w3lib and queuelib python packages.
• Add pypy 2.1 to continuous integration tests (:commit:`ecfa7431`)
• Pylinted, pep8 and removed old-style exceptions from source (:issue:`430`, :issue:`432`)
• Use importlib for parametric imports (:issue:`445`)
• Handle a regression introduced in Python 2.7.5 that affects XmlItemExporter (:issue:`372`)
• Bugfix crawling shutdown on SIGINT (:issue:`450`)
• Do not submit reset type inputs in FormRequest.from_response (:commit:`b326b87`)
• Do not silence download errors when request errback raises an exception (:commit:`684cfc0`)

Bugfixes¶

• Fix tests under Django 1.6 (:commit:`b6bed44c`)
• Lot of bugfixes to retry middleware under disconnections using HTTP 1.1 download handler
• Fix inconsistencies among Twisted releases (:issue:`406`)
• Fix scrapy shell bugs (:issue:`418`, :issue:`407`)
• Fix invalid variable name in setup.py (:issue:`429`)
• Fix tutorial references (:issue:`387`)
• Improve request-response docs (:issue:`391`)
• Improve best practices docs (:issue:`399`, :issue:`400`, :issue:`401`, :issue:`402`)
• Improve django integration docs (:issue:`404`)
• Document bindaddress request meta (:commit:`37c24e01d7`)
• Improve Request class documentation (:issue:`226`)

Other¶

• Dropped Python 2.6 support (:issue:`448`)
• Add cssselect python package as install dependency
• Drop libxml2 and multi selector’s backend support, lxml is required from now on.
• Minimum Twisted version increased to 10.0.0, dropped Twisted 8.0 support.
• Running test suite now requires mock python library (:issue:`390`)

Thanks¶

Thanks to everyone who contribute to this release!

List of contributors sorted by number of commits:

69 Daniel Graña <dangra@...>
37 Pablo Hoffman <pablo@...>
13 Mikhail Korobov <kmike84@...>
 9 Alex Cepoi <alex.cepoi@...>
 9 alexanderlukanin13 <alexander.lukanin.13@...>
 8 Rolando Espinoza La fuente <darkrho@...>
 8 Lukasz Biedrycki <lukasz.biedrycki@...>
 6 Nicolas Ramirez <nramirez.uy@...>
 3 Paul Tremberth <paul.tremberth@...>
 2 Martin Olveyra <molveyra@...>
 2 Stefan <misc@...>
 2 Rolando Espinoza <darkrho@...>
 2 Loren Davie <loren@...>
 2 irgmedeiros <irgmedeiros@...>
 1 Stefan Koch <taikano@...>
 1 Stefan <cct@...>
 1 scraperdragon <dragon@...>
 1 Kumara Tharmalingam <ktharmal@...>
 1 Francesco Piccinno <stack.box@...>
 1 Marcos Campal <duendex@...>
 1 Dragon Dave <dragon@...>
 1 Capi Etheriel <barraponto@...>
 1 cacovsky <amarquesferraz@...>
 1 Berend Iwema <berend@...>

New features and settings¶

• Support for AJAX crawleable urls

• New persistent scheduler that stores requests on disk, allowing to suspend and resume crawls (:rev:`2737`)

• added -o option to scrapy crawl, a shortcut for dumping scraped items into a file (or standard output using -)

• Added support for passing custom settings to Scrapyd schedule.json api (:rev:`2779`, :rev:`2783`)

• New ChunkedTransferMiddleware (enabled by default) to support chunked transfer encoding (:rev:`2769`)

• Add boto 2.0 support for S3 downloader handler (:rev:`2763`)

• Added marshal to formats supported by feed exports (:rev:`2744`)

• In request errbacks, offending requests are now received in failure.request attribute (:rev:`2738`)

• Big downloader refactoring to support per domain/ip concurrency limits (:rev:`2732`)

  • CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_SPIDER setting has been deprecated and replaced by:

    • :setting:`CONCURRENT_REQUESTS`, :setting:`CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_DOMAIN`, :setting:`CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_IP`

  • check the documentation for more details

• Added builtin caching DNS resolver (:rev:`2728`)

• Moved Amazon AWS-related components/extensions (SQS spider queue, SimpleDB stats collector) to a separate project: [scaws](https://github.com/scrapinghub/scaws) (:rev:`2706`, :rev:`2714`)

• Moved spider queues to scrapyd: scrapy.spiderqueue -> scrapyd.spiderqueue (:rev:`2708`)

• Moved sqlite utils to scrapyd: scrapy.utils.sqlite -> scrapyd.sqlite (:rev:`2781`)

• Real support for returning iterators on start_requests() method. The iterator is now consumed during the crawl when the spider is getting idle (:rev:`2704`)

• Added :setting:`REDIRECT_ENABLED` setting to quickly enable/disable the redirect middleware (:rev:`2697`)

• Added :setting:`RETRY_ENABLED` setting to quickly enable/disable the retry middleware (:rev:`2694`)

• Added CloseSpider exception to manually close spiders (:rev:`2691`)

• Improved encoding detection by adding support for HTML5 meta charset declaration (:rev:`2690`)

• Refactored close spider behavior to wait for all downloads to finish and be processed by spiders, before closing the spider (:rev:`2688`)

• Added SitemapSpider (see documentation in Spiders page) (:rev:`2658`)

• Added LogStats extension for periodically logging basic stats (like crawled pages and scraped items) (:rev:`2657`)

• Make handling of gzipped responses more robust (#319, :rev:`2643`). Now Scrapy will try and decompress as much as possible from a gzipped response, instead of failing with an IOError.

• Simplified !MemoryDebugger extension to use stats for dumping memory debugging info (:rev:`2639`)

• Added new command to edit spiders: scrapy edit (:rev:`2636`) and -e flag to genspider command that uses it (:rev:`2653`)

• Changed default representation of items to pretty-printed dicts. (:rev:`2631`). This improves default logging by making log more readable in the default case, for both Scraped and Dropped lines.

• Added :signal:`spider_error` signal (:rev:`2628`)

• Added :setting:`COOKIES_ENABLED` setting (:rev:`2625`)

• Stats are now dumped to Scrapy log (default value of :setting:`STATS_DUMP` setting has been changed to True). This is to make Scrapy users more aware of Scrapy stats and the data that is collected there.

• Added support for dynamically adjusting download delay and maximum concurrent requests (:rev:`2599`)

• Added new DBM HTTP cache storage backend (:rev:`2576`)

• Added listjobs.json API to Scrapyd (:rev:`2571`)

• CsvItemExporter: added join_multivalued parameter (:rev:`2578`)

• Added namespace support to xmliter_lxml (:rev:`2552`)

• Improved cookies middleware by making COOKIES_DEBUG nicer and documenting it (:rev:`2579`)

• Several improvements to Scrapyd and Link extractors

Code rearranged and removed¶

• Merged item passed and item scraped concepts, as they have often proved confusing in the past. This means: (:rev:`2630`)

  • original item_scraped signal was removed
  • original item_passed signal was renamed to item_scraped
  • old log lines Scraped Item... were removed
  • old log lines Passed Item... were renamed to Scraped Item... lines and downgraded to DEBUG level

• Reduced Scrapy codebase by striping part of Scrapy code into two new libraries:

  • w3lib (several functions from scrapy.utils.{http,markup,multipart,response,url}, done in :rev:`2584`)
  • scrapely (was scrapy.contrib.ibl, done in :rev:`2586`)

• Removed unused function: scrapy.utils.request.request_info() (:rev:`2577`)

• Removed googledir project from examples/googledir. There’s now a new example project called dirbot available on github: https://github.com/scrapy/dirbot

• Removed support for default field values in Scrapy items (:rev:`2616`)

• Removed experimental crawlspider v2 (:rev:`2632`)

• Removed scheduler middleware to simplify architecture. Duplicates filter is now done in the scheduler itself, using the same dupe fltering class as before (DUPEFILTER_CLASS setting) (:rev:`2640`)

• Removed support for passing urls to scrapy crawl command (use scrapy parse instead) (:rev:`2704`)

• Removed deprecated Execution Queue (:rev:`2704`)

• Removed (undocumented) spider context extension (from scrapy.contrib.spidercontext) (:rev:`2780`)

• removed CONCURRENT_SPIDERS setting (use scrapyd maxproc instead) (:rev:`2789`)

• Renamed attributes of core components: downloader.sites -> downloader.slots, scraper.sites -> scraper.slots (:rev:`2717`, :rev:`2718`)

• Renamed setting CLOSESPIDER_ITEMPASSED to :setting:`CLOSESPIDER_ITEMCOUNT` (:rev:`2655`). Backwards compatibility kept.

New features and improvements¶

• Passed item is now sent in the item argument of the :signal:`item_passed` (#273)
• Added verbose option to scrapy version command, useful for bug reports (#298)
• HTTP cache now stored by default in the project data dir (#279)
• Added project data storage directory (#276, #277)
• Documented file structure of Scrapy projects (see command-line tool doc)
• New lxml backend for XPath selectors (#147)
• Per-spider settings (#245)
• Support exit codes to signal errors in Scrapy commands (#248)
• Added -c argument to scrapy shell command
• Made libxml2 optional (#260)
• New deploy command (#261)
• Added :setting:`CLOSESPIDER_PAGECOUNT` setting (#253)
• Added :setting:`CLOSESPIDER_ERRORCOUNT` setting (#254)

Scrapyd changes¶

• Scrapyd now uses one process per spider
• It stores one log file per spider run, and rotate them keeping the lastest 5 logs per spider (by default)
• A minimal web ui was added, available at http://localhost:6800 by default
• There is now a scrapy server command to start a Scrapyd server of the current project

Changes to settings¶

• added HTTPCACHE_ENABLED setting (False by default) to enable HTTP cache middleware
• changed HTTPCACHE_EXPIRATION_SECS semantics: now zero means “never expire”.

Deprecated/obsoleted functionality¶

• Deprecated runserver command in favor of server command which starts a Scrapyd server. See also: Scrapyd changes
• Deprecated queue command in favor of using Scrapyd schedule.json API. See also: Scrapyd changes
• Removed the !LxmlItemLoader (experimental contrib which never graduated to main contrib)

New features and improvements¶

• New Scrapy service called scrapyd for deploying Scrapy crawlers in production (#218) (documentation available)
• Simplified Images pipeline usage which doesn’t require subclassing your own images pipeline now (#217)
• Scrapy shell now shows the Scrapy log by default (#206)
• Refactored execution queue in a common base code and pluggable backends called “spider queues” (#220)
• New persistent spider queue (based on SQLite) (#198), available by default, which allows to start Scrapy in server mode and then schedule spiders to run.
• Added documentation for Scrapy command-line tool and all its available sub-commands. (documentation available)
• Feed exporters with pluggable backends (#197) (documentation available)
• Deferred signals (#193)
• Added two new methods to item pipeline open_spider(), close_spider() with deferred support (#195)
• Support for overriding default request headers per spider (#181)
• Replaced default Spider Manager with one with similar functionality but not depending on Twisted Plugins (#186)
• Splitted Debian package into two packages - the library and the service (#187)
• Scrapy log refactoring (#188)
• New extension for keeping persistent spider contexts among different runs (#203)
• Added dont_redirect request.meta key for avoiding redirects (#233)
• Added dont_retry request.meta key for avoiding retries (#234)

Command-line tool changes¶

• New scrapy command which replaces the old scrapy-ctl.py (#199) - there is only one global scrapy command now, instead of one scrapy-ctl.py per project - Added scrapy.bat script for running more conveniently from Windows
• Added bash completion to command-line tool (#210)
• Renamed command start to runserver (#209)

API changes¶

• url and body attributes of Request objects are now read-only (#230)

• Request.copy() and Request.replace() now also copies their callback and errback attributes (#231)

• Removed UrlFilterMiddleware from scrapy.contrib (already disabled by default)

• Offsite middelware doesn’t filter out any request coming from a spider that doesn’t have a allowed_domains attribute (#225)

• Removed Spider Manager load() method. Now spiders are loaded in the constructor itself.

• Changes to Scrapy Manager (now called “Crawler”):

  • scrapy.core.manager.ScrapyManager class renamed to scrapy.crawler.Crawler
  • scrapy.core.manager.scrapymanager singleton moved to scrapy.project.crawler

• Moved module: scrapy.contrib.spidermanager to scrapy.spidermanager

• Spider Manager singleton moved from scrapy.spider.spiders to the spiders` attribute of ``scrapy.project.crawler singleton.

• moved Stats Collector classes: (#204)

  • scrapy.stats.collector.StatsCollector to scrapy.statscol.StatsCollector
  • scrapy.stats.collector.SimpledbStatsCollector to scrapy.contrib.statscol.SimpledbStatsCollector

• default per-command settings are now specified in the default_settings attribute of command object class (#201)

• changed arguments of Item pipeline process_item() method from (spider, item) to (item, spider)

  • backwards compatibility kept (with deprecation warning)

• moved scrapy.core.signals module to scrapy.signals

  • backwards compatibility kept (with deprecation warning)

• moved scrapy.core.exceptions module to scrapy.exceptions

  • backwards compatibility kept (with deprecation warning)

• added handles_request() class method to BaseSpider

• dropped scrapy.log.exc() function (use scrapy.log.err() instead)

• dropped component argument of scrapy.log.msg() function

• dropped scrapy.log.log_level attribute

• Added from_settings() class methods to Spider Manager, and Item Pipeline Manager

Changes to settings¶

• Added HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_SCHEMES setting to ignore certain schemes on !HttpCacheMiddleware (#225)
• Added SPIDER_QUEUE_CLASS setting which defines the spider queue to use (#220)
• Added KEEP_ALIVE setting (#220)
• Removed SERVICE_QUEUE setting (#220)
• Removed COMMANDS_SETTINGS_MODULE setting (#201)
• Renamed REQUEST_HANDLERS to DOWNLOAD_HANDLERS and make download handlers classes (instead of functions)

New features and improvements¶

• Added SMTP-AUTH support to scrapy.mail
• New settings added: MAIL_USER, MAIL_PASS (:rev:`2065` | #149)
• Added new scrapy-ctl view command - To view URL in the browser, as seen by Scrapy (:rev:`2039`)
• Added web service for controlling Scrapy process (this also deprecates the web console. (:rev:`2053` | #167)
• Support for running Scrapy as a service, for production systems (:rev:`1988`, :rev:`2054`, :rev:`2055`, :rev:`2056`, :rev:`2057` | #168)
• Added wrapper induction library (documentation only available in source code for now). (:rev:`2011`)
• Simplified and improved response encoding support (:rev:`1961`, :rev:`1969`)
• Added LOG_ENCODING setting (:rev:`1956`, documentation available)
• Added RANDOMIZE_DOWNLOAD_DELAY setting (enabled by default) (:rev:`1923`, doc available)
• MailSender is no longer IO-blocking (:rev:`1955` | #146)
• Linkextractors and new Crawlspider now handle relative base tag urls (:rev:`1960` | #148)
• Several improvements to Item Loaders and processors (:rev:`2022`, :rev:`2023`, :rev:`2024`, :rev:`2025`, :rev:`2026`, :rev:`2027`, :rev:`2028`, :rev:`2029`, :rev:`2030`)
• Added support for adding variables to telnet console (:rev:`2047` | #165)
• Support for requests without callbacks (:rev:`2050` | #166)

API changes¶

• Change Spider.domain_name to Spider.name (SEP-012, :rev:`1975`)
• Response.encoding is now the detected encoding (:rev:`1961`)
• HttpErrorMiddleware now returns None or raises an exception (:rev:`2006` | #157)
• scrapy.command modules relocation (:rev:`2035`, :rev:`2036`, :rev:`2037`)
• Added ExecutionQueue for feeding spiders to scrape (:rev:`2034`)
• Removed ExecutionEngine singleton (:rev:`2039`)
• Ported S3ImagesStore (images pipeline) to use boto and threads (:rev:`2033`)
• Moved module: scrapy.management.telnet to scrapy.telnet (:rev:`2047`)

Changes to default settings¶

• Changed default SCHEDULER_ORDER to DFO (:rev:`1939`)

New features¶

• Added DEFAULT_RESPONSE_ENCODING setting (:rev:`1809`)
• Added dont_click argument to FormRequest.from_response() method (:rev:`1813`, :rev:`1816`)
• Added clickdata argument to FormRequest.from_response() method (:rev:`1802`, :rev:`1803`)
• Added support for HTTP proxies (HttpProxyMiddleware) (:rev:`1781`, :rev:`1785`)
• Offiste spider middleware now logs messages when filtering out requests (:rev:`1841`)

Backwards-incompatible changes¶

• Changed scrapy.utils.response.get_meta_refresh() signature (:rev:`1804`)

• Removed deprecated scrapy.item.ScrapedItem class - use scrapy.item.Item instead (:rev:`1838`)

• Removed deprecated scrapy.xpath module - use scrapy.selector instead. (:rev:`1836`)

• Removed deprecated core.signals.domain_open signal - use core.signals.domain_opened instead (:rev:`1822`)

• log.msg() now receives a spider argument (:rev:`1822`)

  • Old domain argument has been deprecated and will be removed in 0.9. For spiders, you should always use the spider argument and pass spider references. If you really want to pass a string, use the component argument instead.

• Changed core signals domain_opened, domain_closed, domain_idle

• Changed Item pipeline to use spiders instead of domains

  • The domain argument of process_item() item pipeline method was changed to spider, the new signature is: process_item(spider, item) (:rev:`1827` | #105)
  • To quickly port your code (to work with Scrapy 0.8) just use spider.domain_name where you previously used domain.

• Changed Stats API to use spiders instead of domains (:rev:`1849` | #113)

  • StatsCollector was changed to receive spider references (instead of domains) in its methods (set_value, inc_value, etc).
  • added StatsCollector.iter_spider_stats() method
  • removed StatsCollector.list_domains() method
  • Also, Stats signals were renamed and now pass around spider references (instead of domains). Here’s a summary of the changes:
  • To quickly port your code (to work with Scrapy 0.8) just use spider.domain_name where you previously used domain. spider_stats contains exactly the same data as domain_stats.

• CloseDomain extension moved to scrapy.contrib.closespider.CloseSpider (:rev:`1833`)

  • Its settings were also renamed:

    • CLOSEDOMAIN_TIMEOUT to CLOSESPIDER_TIMEOUT
    • CLOSEDOMAIN_ITEMCOUNT to CLOSESPIDER_ITEMCOUNT

• Removed deprecated SCRAPYSETTINGS_MODULE environment variable - use SCRAPY_SETTINGS_MODULE instead (:rev:`1840`)

• Renamed setting: REQUESTS_PER_DOMAIN to CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_SPIDER (:rev:`1830`, :rev:`1844`)

• Renamed setting: CONCURRENT_DOMAINS to CONCURRENT_SPIDERS (:rev:`1830`)

• Refactored HTTP Cache middleware

• HTTP Cache middleware has been heavilty refactored, retaining the same functionality except for the domain sectorization which was removed. (:rev:`1843` )

• Renamed exception: DontCloseDomain to DontCloseSpider (:rev:`1859` | #120)

• Renamed extension: DelayedCloseDomain to SpiderCloseDelay (:rev:`1861` | #121)

• Removed obsolete scrapy.utils.markup.remove_escape_chars function - use scrapy.utils.markup.replace_escape_chars instead (:rev:`1865`)