Set up Scrapy framework to run on Python 2.7

Is it possible to select which version of Python is used by Scrapy? I am running Scrapy on Ubuntu 10.04 which ships with Python 2.6. I have Python 2.7 installed on my machine and would like to take advantage of some of the features of this later version but do not开发者_StackOverflow中文版 know how to set Scrapy to run on 2.7. When I type "python" into terminal, it runs Python 2.6 ("python2.7" loads Python 2.7). Ideas?

The right way to do this is to organize things so that your special Python is in its own subdirectory that has a bin and lib subdirectory. Then you put that subdirectory in the PATH environment variable before the system binary directories.

For instance, lets say you have a /python directory and you put the python binary in /python/bin/python. Whether you do that by building python from scratch, copying files, or linking to existing files, is not important. They will all work. Note that it may not be enough to simply link to the existing python2.7 binary since that will likely expect to find the Python libraries in /python/lib if you run it this way.

Second step is to run export PATH=/python/bin:$PATH. You can type that at the shell prompt to experiment, but longer term that should either go in a ~/.profile file, or in a special shell script used to run your application, such as scrapy.

Note that a very popular way for Python developers to do this is to install and setup virtualenv but if you aren't going to be changing environments every day, that is probably overkill.

If you have this problem on a lot of machines then you might want to have a custom build of Python that you can use everywhere such as the portable python built with this script.

When I type "python" into terminal, it runs Python 2.6 ("python2.7" loads Python 2.7). Ideas?

vic@ubuntu:~$ which python
/usr/bin/python
vic@ubuntu:~$ cd /usr/bin
vic@ubuntu:/usr/bin$ ls -l python
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2011-05-09 19:38 python -> python2.7
vic@ubuntu:/usr/bin$ 

python executable is a symbolic link. Change it to point to 2.7 version and you are done.

This will make 2.7 version as default.

Otherwise, run your your scripts, which need python 2.7, like: python2.7 my_script_which_uses_scrapy.py