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If you got the error requirement specifiers; Expected version spec … while installing grab via the pip then you have outdated setuptools or pip packages.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

If you have problems with installing lxml with pip try to manually install lxml with packages available here http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#lxml I

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:

weblib
six
user_agent
selection
lxml
defusedxml