About Projects

In most cases, a project is one script you write for one website.

• Projects are independent, but you can import another project as a module with from projects import other_project
• A project has 5 status: TODO, STOP, CHECKING, DEBUG and RUNNING
  • TODO - a script is just created to be written
  • STOP - you can mark a project as STOP if you want it to STOP (= =).
  • CHECKING - when a running project is modified, to prevent incomplete modification, project status will be set as CHECKING automatically.
  • DEBUG/RUNNING - these two status have no difference to spider. But it's good to mark it as DEBUG when it's running the first time then change it to RUNNING after being checked.
• The crawl rate is controlled by rate and burst with token-bucket algorithm.
  • rate - how many requests in one second
  • burst - consider this situation, rate/burst = 0.1/3, it means that the spider scrawls 1 page every 10 seconds. All tasks are finished, project is checking last updated items every minute. Assume that 3 new items are found, pyspider will "burst" and crawl 3 tasks without waiting 3*10 seconds. However, the fourth task needs wait 10 seconds.
• To delete a project, set group to delete and status to STOP, wait 24 hours.

on_finished callback

You can override on_finished method in the project, the method would be triggered when the task_queue goes to 0.

Example 1: When you start a project to crawl a website with 100 pages, the on_finished callback will be fired when 100 pages are successfully crawled or failed after retries.

Example 2: A project with auto_recrawl tasks will NEVER trigger the on_finished callback, because time queue will never become 0 when there are auto_recrawl tasks in it.

Example 3: A project with @every decorated method will trigger the on_finished callback every time when the newly submitted tasks are finished.