Scrapy Unit Testing

Question

I'd like to implement some unit tests in a Scrapy (screen scraper/web crawler). Since a project is run through the "scrapy crawl" command I can run it through something like nose. Since scrapy is built on top of twisted can I use its unit testing framework Trial? If so, how? Otherwise I'd like to get nose working.

Update:

I've been talking on Scrapy-Users and I guess I am supposed to "build the Response in the test code, and then call the method with the response and assert that [I] get the expected items/requests in the output". I can't seem to get this to work though.

I can build a unit-test test class and in a test:

• create a response object
• try to call the parse method of my spider with the response object

However it ends up generating this traceback. Any insight as to why?

Answer 1

The way I've done it is create fake responses, this way you can test the parse function offline. But you get the real situation by using real HTML.

A problem with this approach is that your local HTML file may not reflect the latest state online. So if the HTML changes online you may have a big bug, but your test cases will still pass. So it may not be the best way to test this way.

My current workflow is, whenever there is an error I will sent an email to admin, with the url. Then for that specific error I create a html file with the content which is causing the error. Then I create a unittest for it.

This is the code I use to create sample Scrapy http responses for testing from an local html file:

# scrapyproject/tests/responses/__init__.py

import os

from scrapy.http import Response, Request

def fake_response_from_file(file_name, url=None):
    """
    Create a Scrapy fake HTTP response from a HTML file
    @param file_name: The relative filename from the responses directory,
                      but absolute paths are also accepted.
    @param url: The URL of the response.
    returns: A scrapy HTTP response which can be used for unittesting.
    """
    if not url:
        url = 'http://www.example.com'

    request = Request(url=url)
    if not file_name[0] == '/':
        responses_dir = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__))
        file_path = os.path.join(responses_dir, file_name)
    else:
        file_path = file_name

    file_content = open(file_path, 'r').read()

    response = Response(url=url,
        request=request,
        body=file_content)
    response.encoding = 'utf-8'
    return response

The sample html file is located in scrapyproject/tests/responses/osdir/sample.html

Then the testcase could look as follows: The test case location is scrapyproject/tests/test_osdir.py

import unittest
from scrapyproject.spiders import osdir_spider
from responses import fake_response_from_file

class OsdirSpiderTest(unittest.TestCase):

    def setUp(self):
        self.spider = osdir_spider.DirectorySpider()

    def _test_item_results(self, results, expected_length):
        count = 0
        permalinks = set()
        for item in results:
            self.assertIsNotNone(item['content'])
            self.assertIsNotNone(item['title'])
        self.assertEqual(count, expected_length)

    def test_parse(self):
        results = self.spider.parse(fake_response_from_file('osdir/sample.html'))
        self._test_item_results(results, 10)

That's basically how I test my parsing methods, but its not only for parsing methods. If it gets more complex I suggest looking at Mox

Answer 2

Slightly simpler, by removing the def fake_response_from_file from the chosen answer:

import unittest
from spiders.my_spider import MySpider
from scrapy.selector import Selector


class TestParsers(unittest.TestCase):


    def setUp(self):
        self.spider = MySpider(limit=1)
        self.html = Selector(text=open("some.htm", 'r').read())


    def test_some_parse(self):
        expected = "some-text"
        result = self.spider.some_parse(self.html)
        self.assertEqual(result, expected)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    unittest.main()

Answer 3

I'm using Twisted's trial to run tests, similar to Scrapy's own tests. It already starts a reactor, so I make use of the CrawlerRunner without worrying about starting and stopping one in the tests.

Stealing some ideas from the check and parse Scrapy commands I ended up with the following base TestCase class to run assertions against live sites:

from twisted.trial import unittest

from scrapy.crawler import CrawlerRunner
from scrapy.http import Request
from scrapy.item import BaseItem
from scrapy.utils.spider import iterate_spider_output

class SpiderTestCase(unittest.TestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        self.runner = CrawlerRunner()

    def make_test_class(self, cls, url):
        """
        Make a class that proxies to the original class,
        sets up a URL to be called, and gathers the items
        and requests returned by the parse function.
        """
        class TestSpider(cls):
            # This is a once used class, so writing into
            # the class variables is fine. The framework
            # will instantiate it, not us.
            items = []
            requests = []

            def start_requests(self):
                req = super(TestSpider, self).make_requests_from_url(url)
                req.meta["_callback"] = req.callback or self.parse
                req.callback = self.collect_output
                yield req

            def collect_output(self, response):
                try:
                    cb = response.request.meta["_callback"]
                    for x in iterate_spider_output(cb(response)):
                        if isinstance(x, (BaseItem, dict)):
                            self.items.append(x)
                        elif isinstance(x, Request):
                            self.requests.append(x)
                except Exception as ex:
                    print("ERROR", "Could not execute callback: ",     ex)
                    raise ex

                # Returning any requests here would make the     crawler follow them.
                return None

        return TestSpider

Example:

@defer.inlineCallbacks
def test_foo(self):
    tester = self.make_test_class(FooSpider, 'https://foo.com')
    yield self.runner.crawl(tester)
    self.assertEqual(len(tester.items), 1)
    self.assertEqual(len(tester.requests), 2)

or perform one request in the setup and run multiple tests against the results:

@defer.inlineCallbacks
def setUp(self):
    super(FooTestCase, self).setUp()
    if FooTestCase.tester is None:
        FooTestCase.tester = self.make_test_class(FooSpider, 'https://foo.com')
        yield self.runner.crawl(self.tester)

def test_foo(self):
    self.assertEqual(len(self.tester.items), 1)

Answer 4

I use Betamax to run test on real site the first time and keep http responses locally so that next tests run super fast after:

Betamax intercepts every request you make and attempts to find a matching request that has already been intercepted and recorded.

When you need to get latest version of site, just remove what betamax has recorded and re-run test.

Example:

from scrapy import Spider, Request
from scrapy.http import HtmlResponse


class Example(Spider):
    name = 'example'

    url = 'http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/_static/selectors-sample1.html'

    def start_requests(self):
        yield Request(self.url, self.parse)

    def parse(self, response):
        for href in response.xpath('//a/@href').extract():
            yield {'image_href': href}


# Test part
from betamax import Betamax
from betamax.fixtures.unittest import BetamaxTestCase


with Betamax.configure() as config:
    # where betamax will store cassettes (http responses):
    config.cassette_library_dir = 'cassettes'
    config.preserve_exact_body_bytes = True


class TestExample(BetamaxTestCase):  # superclass provides self.session

    def test_parse(self):
        example = Example()

        # http response is recorded in a betamax cassette:
        response = self.session.get(example.url)

        # forge a scrapy response to test
        scrapy_response = HtmlResponse(body=response.content, url=example.url)

        result = example.parse(scrapy_response)

        self.assertEqual({'image_href': u'image1.html'}, result.next())
        self.assertEqual({'image_href': u'image2.html'}, result.next())
        self.assertEqual({'image_href': u'image3.html'}, result.next())
        self.assertEqual({'image_href': u'image4.html'}, result.next())
        self.assertEqual({'image_href': u'image5.html'}, result.next())

        with self.assertRaises(StopIteration):
            result.next()

FYI, I discover betamax at pycon 2015 thanks to Ian Cordasco's talk.

Answer 5

You can follow this snippet from the scrapy site to run it from a script. Then you can make any kind of asserts you'd like on the returned items.

Answer 6

The newly added Spider Contracts are worth trying. It gives you a simple way to add tests without requiring a lot of code.