Installation

Linux + Docker

  1. Install Docker.

  2. Pull the image:

    $ sudo docker pull scrapinghub/splash
    
  3. Start the container:

    $ sudo docker run -p 5023:5023 -p 8050:8050 -p 8051:8051 scrapinghub/splash
    
  4. Splash is now available at 0.0.0.0 at ports 8050 (http), 8051 (https) and 5023 (telnet).

OS X + Docker

  1. Install Docker (via Boot2Docker).

  2. Pull the image:

    $ docker pull scrapinghub/splash
    
  3. Start the container:

    $ docker run -p 5023:5023 -p 8050:8050 -p 8051:8051 scrapinghub/splash
    
  4. Figure out the ip address of boot2docker:

    $ boot2docker ip
    
    The VM's Host only interface IP address is: 192.168.59.103
    
  5. Splash is available at the returned IP address at ports 8050 (http), 8051 (https) and 5023 (telnet).

Ubuntu 12.04 (manual way)

  1. Install system dependencies:

    $ sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:pi-rho/security
    $ sudo apt-get update
    $ sudo apt-get install libre2-dev
    $ sudo apt-get install netbase ca-certificates python \
                           python-dev build-essential libicu48 \
                           xvfb libqt4-webkit python-twisted python-qt4
    
  2. TODO: install Python dependencies using pip, clone repo, chdir to it, start splash.

To run the server execute the following command:

python -m splash.server

Run python -m splash.server --help to see options available.

By default, Splash API endpoints listen to port 8050 on all available IPv4 addresses. To change the port use --port option:

python -m splash.server --port=5000

Requirements

# install PyQt4 (Splash is tested on PyQT 4.9.x) and the following packages:
twisted
qt4reactor
psutil
adblockparser >= 0.2
-e git+https://github.com/axiak/pyre2.git#egg=re2
xvfbwrapper

# the following libraries are only required by tests
pytest
pyOpenSSL
requests >= 1.0
Pillow
jsonschema >= 2.0
strict-rfc3339

Customizing Dockerized Splash

Passing Custom Options

To run Splash with custom options pass them to docker run. For example, let’s increase log verbosity:

$ docker run -p 8050:8050 scrapinghub/splash -v3

To see all possible options pass --help. Not all options will work the same inside Docker: changing ports doesn’t make sense (use docker run options instead), and paths are paths in the container.

Folders Sharing

To set custom Request Filters use -v Docker option. First, create a folder with request filters on your local filesystem, then make it available to the container:

$ docker run -p 8050:8050 -v <filters-dir>:/etc/splash/filters scrapinghub/splash

Docker Data Volume Containers can also be used. Check https://docs.docker.com/userguide/dockervolumes/ for more info.

Proxy Profiles and Javascript Profiles can be added the same way:

$ docker run -p 8050:8050 \
      -v <proxy-profiles-dir>:/etc/splash/proxy-profiles \
      -v <js-profiles-dir>:/etc/splash/js-profiles \
      scrapinghub/splash

Warning

Folder sharing (-v option) doesn’t work on OS X and Windows (see https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/4023). It should be fixed in future Docker & Boot2Docker releases. For now use one of the workarounds mentioned in issue comments or clone Splash repo and customize its Dockerfile.

Splash in Production

In production you may want to daemonize Splash, start it on boot and restart on failures. Since Docker 1.2 an easy way to do this is to use --restart and -d options together:

$ docker run -d -p 8050:8050 --restart=always scrapinghub/splash

Another way to do that is to use standard tools like upstart, systemd or supervisor.