How to use PyCharm to debug Scrapy projects
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?
What I have tried
Actually I tried to run the spider as a script. As a result, I built that script. Then, I tried to add my Scrapy project to PyCharm as a model like this:File->Setting->Project structure->Add content root.
But I don't know what else I have to do
Answer
The scrapy command is a python script which means you can start it from inside PyCharm.
When you examine the scrapy binary (which scrapy) you will notice that this is actually a python script:
#!/usr/bin/python
from scrapy.cmdline import execute
execute()
This means that a command like
scrapy crawl IcecatCrawler can also be executed like this: python /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/scrapy/cmdline.py crawl IcecatCrawler
Try to find the scrapy.cmdline package.
In my case the location was here: /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/scrapy/cmdline.py
Create a run/debug configuration inside PyCharm with that script as script. Fill the script parameters with the scrapy command and spider. In this case crawl IcecatCrawler.
Like this:
Put your breakpoints anywhere in your crawling code and it should work™.