how to handle 302 redirect in scrapy

Question

I am receiving a 302 response from a server while scrapping a website:

2014-04-01 21:31:51+0200 [ahrefs-h] DEBUG: Redirecting (302) to 

        

Answer 1

An unexplicable 302 response, such as redirecting from a page that loads fine in a web browser to the home page or some fixed page, usually indicates a server-side measure against undesired activity.

You must either reduce your crawl rate or use a smart proxy (e.g. Crawlera) or a proxy-rotation service and retry your requests when you get such a response.

To retry such a response, add 'handle_httpstatus_list': [302] to the meta of the source request, and check if response.status == 302 in the callback. If it is, retry your request by yielding response.request.replace(dont_filter=True).

When retrying, you should also make your code limit the maximum number of retries of any given URL. You could keep a dictionary to track retries:

class MySpider(Spider):
    name = 'my_spider'

    max_retries = 2

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.retries = {}

    def start_requests(self):
        yield Request(
            'https://example.com',
            callback=self.parse,
            meta={
                'handle_httpstatus_list': [302],
            },
        )

    def parse(self, response):
        if response.status == 302:
            retries = self.retries.setdefault(response.url, 0)
            if retries < self.max_retries:
                self.retries[response.url] += 1
                yield response.request.replace(dont_filter=True)
            else:
                self.logger.error('%s still returns 302 responses after %s retries',
                                  response.url, retries)
            return

Depending on the scenario, you might want to move this code to a downloader middleware.