How to use PyCharm to debug Scrapy projects

Question

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?

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Answer 1

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.

Answer 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.

Answer 3

I use this simple script:

from scrapy.crawler import CrawlerProcess
from scrapy.utils.project import get_project_settings

process = CrawlerProcess(get_project_settings())

process.crawl('your_spider_name')
process.start()

Answer 4

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.