I Spent a Year Building a Complete Scrapy Handbook. Here's Why.
Source: Dev.to
A while back, I was working on a data project
Nothing crazy. I just needed to pull product prices from a handful of e‑commerce sites every day and dump them into a spreadsheet. Simple enough, right?
Wrong.
Getting the first spider up and running took me way longer than it should have. And once I finally got it working, I quickly realized that was just the easy part. The moment I needed to scrape a site that required login, or one that loaded everything with JavaScript, or figure out how to store my data in an actual database instead of just a CSV file, I was lost again. Each new challenge felt like starting over from scratch.
Over time I figured all of it out, but the process was slow and frustrating. Too much time was spent hunting for answers that should have been easy to find. That’s the gap I wanted to fill. So I sat down and started writing, chapter by chapter, everything I wished someone had taught me from the beginning.
What Is The Scrapy Handbook?
The Scrapy Handbook is a free, open‑source, 45‑chapter guide that takes you from knowing absolutely nothing about web scraping to building and deploying production‑ready scrapers with confidence. It isn’t a collection of random tips; it’s a structured, end‑to‑end journey.
- I started writing it in February 2025, and it took about a year to get right.
- Every chapter went through multiple rounds of revision.
- Code examples were tested.
- Explanations were rewritten until they actually made sense without needing a PhD to understand them.
The whole thing lives on GitHub, and it’s completely free to read.
Who Is This For?
If you’ve ever thought “I want to scrape a website but I have no idea where to start,” this handbook is for you.
If you already know the basics but get stuck the moment things get complicated (JavaScript sites, databases, proxies, deployment), this handbook is also for you.
The handbook is written so that a complete beginner can follow along from chapter 1, yet it goes deep enough that someone with experience will still find value in the later chapters.
What’s Inside?
The handbook is split into nine parts, each building on the one before it. Here’s the journey you’ll take.
| Part | Focus |
|---|---|
| Part I | Introduction to web scraping, environment setup, first Scrapy spider, CSS selectors & XPath. |
| Part II | Data extraction, Scrapy Items & ItemLoaders, cleaning, pipelines, exporting. |
| Part III | Forms, login pages, JavaScript‑rendered sites, media downloads, sitemaps, error handling, performance optimization. |
| Part IV | Databases: SQLite, PostgreSQL, SQLAlchemy ORM, MongoDB, and connecting them to pipelines. |
| Part V | Scaling: distributed crawling with Scrapy‑Redis, strategies, cost analysis, resource optimization, ethics. |
| Part VI | Deployment: VPS setup, production hardening, monitoring, logging, cron scheduling, practical tips. |
| Part VII | Internals: spider middlewares, downloader middlewares, extensions, signals system. |
| Part VIII | Professional side: proxies, IP rotation, anti‑bot techniques, testing, async programming, debugging, profiling, building APIs. |
| Part IX | Bigger picture: legal & ethical considerations, future of web scraping, roadmap for continued learning. |
A Quick Taste
Want to see what Scrapy looks like in action? Here’s all it takes to get started:
pip install scrapy
scrapy startproject myproject
cd myproject
scrapy genspider example example.com
scrapy crawl exampleThat’s it—five commands and you have a spider running. The handbook takes you from this exact starting point all the way to distributed, production‑grade systems.
One Thing I Want to Be Honest About
Web scraping is one of those fields where things break—not because you did something wrong, but because the websites you scrape change their layout, update their code, or add new protections overnight. A selector that works perfectly today might return nothing tomorrow.
I wrote this in the handbook’s README, and I meant it. If you find something in the handbook that no longer works, don’t get frustrated. That’s not a failure; it’s literally the nature of web scraping. It’s a skill you develop over time, and the handbook gives you the tools and mindset to handle it.
If you do find something outdated, feel free to open an issue on the GitHub repo. Or better yet, fix it yourself and submit a pull request. I review and merge contributions as a priority.
Why Open Source?
I could have turned this into a paid course or a book on Amazon. Honestly, the thought crossed my mind. But I kept coming back to the same feeling I had when I was starting out…
The Scrapy Handbook
I was frustrated by the lack of a single, clear place to learn Scrapy. I didn’t want anyone else to go through the same struggle.
So it’s free. It’s on GitHub. Anyone can read it, contribute to it, and benefit from it.
What’s Next?
The handbook is a living document. I’m still adding to it, refining explanations, and updating examples as Scrapy and the scraping landscape evolve. If there’s a topic you think is missing or an explanation that could be clearer, I genuinely want to hear from you.
- Read it: Start from chapter one.
- Contribute: Open issues or pull requests on GitHub.
- Feedback: Let me know what you think.
👉 The Scrapy Handbook on GitHub
Happy scraping! 🕷️