Scrapy shell against a local file

Question

Before Scrapy 1.0, I could've run the Scrapy Shell against a local file quite simply:

$ scrapy shell index.html

After upgrading to 1.0.3, it started to throw an error:

$ scrapy shell index.html
2015-10-12 15:32:59 [scrapy] INFO: Scrapy 1.0.3 started (bot: scrapybot)
2015-10-12 15:32:59 [scrapy] INFO: Optional features available: ssl, http11, boto
2015-10-12 15:32:59 [scrapy] INFO: Overridden settings: {'LOGSTATS_INTERVAL': 0}
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/user/.virtualenvs/so/bin/scrapy", line 11, in <module>
    sys.exit(execute())
  File "/Users/user/.virtualenvs/so/lib/python2.7/site-packages/scrapy/cmdline.py", line 143, in execute
    _run_print_help(parser, _run_command, cmd, args, opts)
  File "/Users/user/.virtualenvs/so/lib/python2.7/site-packages/scrapy/cmdline.py", line 89, in _run_print_help
    func(*a, **kw)
  File "/Users/user/.virtualenvs/so/lib/python2.7/site-packages/scrapy/cmdline.py", line 150, in _run_command
    cmd.run(args, opts)
  File "/Users/user/.virtualenvs/so/lib/python2.7/site-packages/scrapy/commands/shell.py", line 50, in run
    spidercls = spidercls_for_request(spider_loader, Request(url),
  File "/Users/user/.virtualenvs/so/lib/python2.7/site-packages/scrapy/http/request/__init__.py", line 24, in __init__
    self._set_url(url)
  File "/Users/user/.virtualenvs/so/lib/python2.7/site-packages/scrapy/http/request/__init__.py", line 59, in _set_url
    raise ValueError('Missing scheme in request url: %s' % self._url)
ValueError: Missing scheme in request url: index.html 

Is this behavior intended or is this a bug in Scrapy Shell?

---

As a workaround, I can use an absolute path to the file in a "file" URL scheme:

$ scrapy shell file:////absolute/path/to/index.html

which is, obviously, much less convenient and easy.

Answer 1

Update: for Scrapy >=1.1, this is a built-in feature, you can do:

scrapy shell file:///path/to/file.html

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Old answer:

As per discussion in Running scrapy shell against a local file, the relevant change was introduced by this commit. There was a Pull Request for this issue created to make Scrapy shell open local files again and, it is planned to be a part of Scrapy 1.1.