Scrapy CrawlSpider doesn't crawl the first landing page

Question

I am new to Scrapy and I am working on a scraping exercise and I am using the CrawlSpider. Although the Scrapy framework works beautifully and it follows the relevant links,

Answer 1

Just change your callback to parse_start_url and override it:

from scrapy.contrib.spiders import CrawlSpider, Rule
from scrapy.contrib.linkextractors.sgml import SgmlLinkExtractor

class DownloadSpider(CrawlSpider):
    name = 'downloader'
    allowed_domains = ['bnt-chemicals.de']
    start_urls = [
        "http://www.bnt-chemicals.de",
    ]
    rules = (
        Rule(SgmlLinkExtractor(allow='prod'), callback='parse_start_url', follow=True),
    )
    fname = 0

    def parse_start_url(self, response):
        self.fname += 1
        fname = '%s.txt' % self.fname

        with open(fname, 'w') as f:
            f.write('%s, %s\n' % (response.url, response.meta.get('depth', 0)))
            f.write('%s\n' % response.body)