diff --git a/docs/topics/settings.rst b/docs/topics/settings.rst index 178dd3f886e2203bd888f1c4d7ccf5d91dec150a..158fc56aa9b5915293df5c63ccf81ea2c91707f9 100644 --- a/docs/topics/settings.rst +++ b/docs/topics/settings.rst @@ -10,15 +10,31 @@ Settings The Scrapy settings allows you to customize the behaviour of all Scrapy components, including the core, extensions, pipelines and spiders themselves. -The settings infrastructure provides a global namespace of key-value mappings -where the code can pull configuration values from. The settings can be +The infrastructure of setting provides a global namespace of key-value mappings +that the code can use to pull configuration values from. The settings can be populated through different mechanisms, which are described below. -Read :ref:`topics-settings-ref` for all supported entries. +The settings is also the mechanism for selecting the currently active Scrapy +project (in case you have many). -How to populate settings +For a list of available built-in settings see: :ref:`topics-settings-ref`. + +Designating the settings ======================== +When you use Scrapy, you have to tell it which settings you're using. You can +do this by using an environment variable, ``SCRAPY_SETTINGS_MODULE``, or the +``--settings`` argument of the :doc:`scrapy-ctl.py script``. + +The value of ``SCRAPY_SETTINGS_MODULE`` should be in Python path syntax, e.g. +``myproject.settings``. Note that the settings module should be on the +Python `import search path`_. + +.. _import search path: http://diveintopython.org/getting_to_know_python/everything_is_an_object.html + +Populating the settings +======================= + Settings can be populated using different mechanisms, each of which having a different precedence. Here is the list of them in decreasing order of precedence: