Scrapy is a Python-based scraping and web crawling program available in Python Package Index. It means that you can install Scrapy on any operating system if you have pip installed.

Some operating systems provide Scrapy packages specific for their operating system, and version thus doesn't require pip for the installation.

However, these Scrapy packages usually are not as up-to-date as those distributed by pip though it's been better tested and integrated with the specific operating system and version.

Steps to install Scrapy using pip:

  1. Install pip for your operating system if you don't already have them installed.
  2. Install scrapy package using pip.
    user@host:~$ pip3 install scrapy
    Collecting scrapy
      Downloading Scrapy-2.5.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl (254 kB)
         |████████████████████████████████| 254 kB 6.1 MB/s 
    Collecting cssselect>=0.9.1
      Downloading cssselect-1.1.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl (16 kB)
    Requirement already satisfied: cryptography>=2.0 in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from scrapy) (3.3.2)
    Collecting lxml>=3.5.0
      Downloading lxml-4.7.1-cp39-cp39-manylinux_2_17_aarch64.manylinux2014_aarch64.manylinux_2_24_aarch64.whl (6.6 MB)
         |████████████████████████████████| 6.6 MB 52.3 MB/s 
    
    ##### snipped
    
    Installing collected packages: attrs, zope.interface, w3lib, typing-extensions, pyasn1, lxml, incremental, hyperlink, hyperframe, hpack, cssselect, constantly, Automat, Twisted, pyasn1-modules, priority, parsel, jmespath, itemadapter, h2, service-identity, queuelib, PyDispatcher, protego, itemloaders, scrapy
      WARNING: The script automat-visualize is installed in '/home/user/.local/bin' which is not on PATH.
      Consider adding this directory to PATH or, if you prefer to suppress this warning, use --no-warn-script-location.
      WARNING: The scripts cftp, ckeygen, conch, mailmail, pyhtmlizer, tkconch, trial, twist and twistd are installed in '/home/user/.local/bin' which is not on PATH.
      Consider adding this directory to PATH or, if you prefer to suppress this warning, use --no-warn-script-location.
      WARNING: The script scrapy is installed in '/home/user/.local/bin' which is not on PATH.
      Consider adding this directory to PATH or, if you prefer to suppress this warning, use --no-warn-script-location.
    Successfully installed Automat-20.2.0 PyDispatcher-2.0.5 Twisted-21.7.0 attrs-21.4.0 constantly-15.1.0 cssselect-1.1.0 h2-3.2.0 hpack-3.0.0 hyperframe-5.2.0 hyperlink-21.0.0 incremental-21.3.0 itemadapter-0.4.0 itemloaders-1.0.4 jmespath-0.10.0 lxml-4.7.1 parsel-1.6.0 priority-1.3.0 protego-0.1.16 pyasn1-0.4.8 pyasn1-modules-0.2.8 queuelib-1.6.2 scrapy-2.5.1 service-identity-21.1.0 typing-extensions-4.0.1 w3lib-1.22.0 zope.interface-5.4.0

    The installation notes mentions the installation directory, which in this case is /home/user/.local/bin and if the directory is within the PATH environment variable which is where your operating system will look for the program if you run the program without specifying the full path.

  3. Run scrapy using full path.
    $ /home/user/.local/bin/scrapy
    Scrapy 2.5.1 - no active project
    
    Usage:
      scrapy <command> [options] [args]
    
    Available commands:
      bench         Run quick benchmark test
      commands      
      fetch         Fetch a URL using the Scrapy downloader
      genspider     Generate new spider using pre-defined templates
      runspider     Run a self-contained spider (without creating a project)
      settings      Get settings values
      shell         Interactive scraping console
      startproject  Create new project
      version       Print Scrapy version
      view          Open URL in browser, as seen by Scrapy
    
      [ more ]      More commands available when run from project directory
    
    Use "scrapy <command> -h" to see more info about a command
  4. Add pip installation directory to PATH environment variable.
    $ echo PATH=$PATH:/home/user/.local/bin >> ~/.bashrc #Linux
  5. Start a new terminal session to quickly load the new PATH environment variable.
    $ bash 
  6. Run scrapy again without specifying full path.
    $ scrapy
    Scrapy 2.5.1 - no active project
    
    Usage:
      scrapy <command> [options] [args]
    
    Available commands:
      bench         Run quick benchmark test
      commands      
      fetch         Fetch a URL using the Scrapy downloader
      genspider     Generate new spider using pre-defined templates
      runspider     Run a self-contained spider (without creating a project)
      settings      Get settings values
      shell         Interactive scraping console
      startproject  Create new project
      version       Print Scrapy version
      view          Open URL in browser, as seen by Scrapy
    
      [ more ]      More commands available when run from project directory
    
    Use "scrapy <command> -h" to see more info about a command
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