How to use PyCharm to debug Scrapy projects

I am working on Scrapy 0.20 with Python 2.7. I found PyCharm has a good Python debugger. I want to test my Scrapy spiders using it. Anyone knows how to do that please?

What I have tried

File->Setting->Project structure->Add content root.

But I don't know what else I have to do

Solution 1:

The scrapy command is a python script which means you can start it from inside PyCharm.

When you examine the scrapy binary (which scrapy) you will notice that this is actually a python script:

#!/usr/bin/python

from scrapy.cmdline import execute
execute()

This means that a command like scrapy crawl IcecatCrawler can also be executed like this: python /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/scrapy/cmdline.py crawl IcecatCrawler

Try to find the scrapy.cmdline package. In my case the location was here: /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/scrapy/cmdline.py

Create a run/debug configuration inside PyCharm with that script as script. Fill the script parameters with the scrapy command and spider. In this case crawl IcecatCrawler.

Like this:

Put your breakpoints anywhere in your crawling code and it should work™.

Solution 2:

You just need to do this.

Create a Python file on crawler folder on your project. I used main.py.

• Project
  • Crawler
    • Crawler
      • Spiders
      • ...
    • main.py
    • scrapy.cfg

Inside your main.py put this code below.

from scrapy import cmdline    
cmdline.execute("scrapy crawl spider".split())

And you need to create a "Run Configuration" to run your main.py.

Doing this, if you put a breakpoint at your code it will stop there.

Solution 3:

As of 2018.1 this became a lot easier. You can now select Module name in your project's Run/Debug Configuration. Set this to scrapy.cmdline and the Working directory to the root dir of the scrapy project (the one with settings.py in it).

Like so:

Now you can add breakpoints to debug your code.

Solution 4:

I am running scrapy in a virtualenv with Python 3.5.0 and setting the "script" parameter to /path_to_project_env/env/bin/scrapy solved the issue for me.

Solution 5:

intellij idea also work.

create main.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
#coding=utf-8
import sys
from scrapy import cmdline
def main(name):
    if name:
        cmdline.execute(name.split())



if __name__ == '__main__':
    print('[*] beginning main thread')
    name = "scrapy crawl stack"
    #name = "scrapy crawl spa"
    main(name)
    print('[*] main thread exited')
    print('main stop====================================================')

show below: