Scrapy with selenium

Scrapy middleware to handle javascript pages using selenium.

Installation

pip install scrapy-selenium

You should use python>=3.6. You will also need one of the Selenium compatible browsers.

Configuration

1. Add the browser to use, the path to the driver executable, and the arguments to pass to the executable to the scrapy settings:

   from shutil import which
   
   SELENIUM_DRIVER_NAME = 'firefox'
   SELENIUM_DRIVER_EXECUTABLE_PATH = which('geckodriver')
   SELENIUM_DRIVER_ARGUMENTS=['-headless']  # '--headless' if using chrome instead of firefox
   SELENIUM_REMOTE_URL = 'http://localhost:4444/wd/hub' # Selenium grid url.
   

   Note: If the grid url is configured, it will be used first.

   Optionally, set the path to the browser executable:

   SELENIUM_BROWSER_EXECUTABLE_PATH = which('firefox')
   

2. Add the SeleniumMiddleware to the downloader middlewares:

   DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES = {
       'scrapy_selenium.SeleniumMiddleware': 800
   }
   

Usage

Use the scrapy_selenium.SeleniumRequest instead of the scrapy built-in Request like below:

from scrapy_selenium import SeleniumRequest

yield SeleniumRequest(url, self.parse_result)

The request will be handled by selenium, and the request will have an additional meta key, named driver containing the selenium driver with the request processed.

def parse_result(self, response):
    print(response.request.meta['driver'].title)

For more information about the available driver methods and attributes, refer to the selenium python documentation

The selector response attribute work as usual (but contains the html processed by the selenium driver).

def parse_result(self, response):
    print(response.selector.xpath('//title/@text'))

Additional arguments

The scrapy_selenium.SeleniumRequest accept 4 additional arguments:

wait_time / wait_until

When used, selenium will perform an Explicit wait before returning the response to the spider.

from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

yield SeleniumRequest(
    url=url,
    callback=self.parse_result,
    wait_time=10,
    wait_until=EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.ID, 'someid'))
)

screenshot

When used, selenium will take a screenshot of the page and the binary data of the .png captured will be added to the response meta:

yield SeleniumRequest(
    url=url,
    callback=self.parse_result,
    screenshot=True
)

def parse_result(self, response):
    with open('image.png', 'wb') as image_file:
        image_file.write(response.meta['screenshot'])

script

When used, selenium will execute custom JavaScript code.

yield SeleniumRequest(
    url,
    self.parse_result,
    script='window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight);',
)