There are diverse tools and techniques that allow a developer or analyst to access, consume, and extract content based on the web. The Scrapy project offers a tool that enables automated and rapid web scraping of large amounts of web-based content. Scrapy has very good documentation, which can be accessed from the following URL: https://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest.

Scrapy was created from Twisted (https://twistedmatrix.com/), so it is capable of performing thousands of queries simultaneously. Similarly, Scrapy makes use of tools such as BeautifulSoup and the Python XML package to facilitate content searches.

Scrapy needs lxml and OpenSSL as prerequisite packages for the installation. You can install Scrapy using pip with the pip install scrapy command.

To install Scrapy using conda, run the following code:

conda install -c scrapinghub scrapy

Once installed, it is possible to use the scrapy command from the command line, using subcommands at the same time.

In this screenshot, we can see all available scrapy subcommands: