This document describes the architecture of Scrapy and how their components interact.
The following diagram shows an overview of the Scrapy architecture with its components and an outline of the data flow that takes place inside the system (shown by the green arrows). A brief description of the components is included below with links for more detailed information about them. The data flow is also described below.
The engine is responsible for controlling the data flow between all components of the system, and triggering events when certain actions occur. See the Data Flow section below for more details.
The Scheduler receives requests from the engine and enqueues them for feeding them later (also to the engine) when the engine requests them.
The Downloader is responsible for fetching web pages and feeding them to the engine which, in turns, feeds them to the spiders.
Spiders are custom classes written by Scrapy users to parse response and extract items (aka scraped items) from them or additional URLs (requests) to follow. Each spider is able to handle a specific domain (or group of domains). For more information see Spiders.
The Item Pipeline is responsible for processing the items once they have been extracted (or scraped) by the spiders. Typical tasks include cleansing, validation and persistence (like storing the item in a database). For more information see Item Pipeline.
Downloader middlewares are specific hooks that sit between the Engine and the Downloader and process requests when they pass from the Engine to the downloader, and responses that pass from Downloader to the Engine. They provide a convenient mechanism for extending Scrapy functionality by plugging custom code. For more information see Downloader Middleware.
Spider middlewares are specific hooks that sit between the Engine and the Spiders and are able to process spider input (responses) and output (items and requests). They provide a convenient mechanism for extending Scrapy functionality by plugging custom code. For more information see Spider Middleware.
Spider middlewares are specific hooks that sit between the Engine and the Scheduler and process requests when they pass from the Engine to the Scheduler and vice-versa. They provide a convenient mechanism for extending Scrapy functionality by plugging custom code.
The data flow in Scrapy is controlled by the Engine, and goes like this: