Grab Installation¶

Common problems¶

1) If you got the error requirement specifiers; Expected version spec … while installing grab via the pip then you have outdated setuptools or pip packages.

Fix the error with following command:

pip install -U setuptools pip

2) If you got out of memory error while installing lxml on linux machine with 512Mb RAM or less then check that you swap file is enabled.

Installation on Linux¶

Update installation tools:

pip install -U setuptools pip

Run the command:

pip install -U grab

This command will install Grab and all dependencies. Be aware that you need to have some libraries installed in your system to successfully build lxml and pycurl dependencies.

To build pycurl successfully you need to install:

apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev

To build lxml successfully you need to install:

apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt-dev

If your system has 512Mb RAM or less you might experience issues during instalation of Grab dependencies. Installation of lxml requries quite a few RAM. In such case enable swap file if it is disabled.

Installation on Windows¶

Step 1. Install lxml. You can get lxml here http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#lxml

Step 2. Install pycurl.

Warning

Do not use the recent version of pycurl (7.43.0 at the moment). This version fails randomly on windows platform. Use 7.19.5.3 version. You can get it here https://bintray.com/pycurl/pycurl/pycurl/view#files

Step 3. Update installation tools

python -m pip install -U pip setuptools

If you don’t have pip installed, install pip first. Download the file get-pip.py from https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py and then run the command

python get-pip.py

Step 4. Install Grab

Now you can install Grab via pip with this command:

python -m pip install grab

Installation on FreeBSD¶

Update installation tools:

pip install -U setuptools pip

Run the command:

pip install -U grab

You can also install Grab from FreeBSD ports (thanks to Ruslan Makhmatkhanov):

To install the port: cd /usr/ports/devel/py-grab/ && make install clean
To add the package: pkg_add -r py27-grab

Installation on MacOS¶

Update installation tools:

pip install -U setuptools pip

Run the command:

pip install -U grab

Dependencies¶

All required dependencies should be installed automatically if you install Grab with pip. Here is list of Grab dependencies:

lxml
pycurl
selection
weblib
six
user_agent

Upgrade Grab from 0.5.x version to 0.6.x¶

In Grab 0.6.x some features were moved out into separate packages. If you install/upgrade Grab with pip, all dependencies should be installed automatically. Anyway, if you have some ImportError issues then try to install dependencies manually with the command:

pip install -U lxml pycurl selection weblib six user_agent