Scrapy Splash won't execute lua script - scrapy

Question

I have ran across an issue in which my Lua script refuses to execute. The returned response from the ScrapyRequest call seems to be an HTML body, while i'm expecting a document title. I am assuming that the Lua script is never being called as it seems to have no apparent effect on the response. I have dug a lot through the documentation and can't quite seem to figure out what is missing here. Does anyone have any suggestions?
from urlparse import urljoin
import scrapy
from scrapy_splash import SplashRequest
GOOGLE_BASE_URL = 'https://www.google.com/'
GOOGLE_QUERY_PARAMETERS = '#q={query}'
GOOGLE_SEARCH_URL = urljoin(GOOGLE_BASE_URL, GOOGLE_QUERY_PARAMETERS)
GOOGLE_SEARCH_QUERY = 'example search query'
LUA_SCRIPT = """
function main(splash)
assert(splash:go(splash.args.url))
return splash:evaljs("document.title")
end
"""
SCRAPY_CRAWLER_NAME = 'google_crawler'
SCRAPY_SPLASH_ENDPOINT = 'render.html'
SCRAPY_ARGS = {
'lua_source': LUA_SCRIPT
}
def get_search_url(query):
return GOOGLE_SEARCH_URL.format(query=query)
class GoogleCrawler(scrapy.Spider):
name=SCRAPY_CRAWLER_NAME
search_url = get_search_url(GOOGLE_SEARCH_QUERY)
def start_requests(self):
response = SplashRequest(self.search_url,
self.parse, endpoint=SPLASH_ENDPOINT, args=SCRAPY_ARGS)
yield response
def parse(self, response):
doc_title = response.body_as_unicode()
print doc_title

Answer 1

'endpoint' argument of SplashRequest must be 'execute' in order to execute a Lua script; it is 'render.html' in the example.

Answer 2

LUA_SCRIPT = """
function main(splash)
assert(splash:go(splash.args.url))
return title = splash:evaljs("document.title")
end
"""
def start_requests(self):
SplashRequest(self.search_url,self.parse, endpoint='execute',args=SCRAPY_ARGS)
You can recover the value with response.data['title']