How to handle a 429 Too Many Requests response in Scrapy?

Question

I\'m trying to run a scraper of which the output log ends as follows:

2017-04-25 20:22:22 [scrapy.spidermiddlewares.httperror] INFO: Ignoring response <42         


        

Answer 1

You can modify the retry middleware to pause when it gets error 429. Put this code below in middlewares.py

from scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.retry import RetryMiddleware
from scrapy.utils.response import response_status_message

import time

class TooManyRequestsRetryMiddleware(RetryMiddleware):

    def __init__(self, crawler):
        super(TooManyRequestsRetryMiddleware, self).__init__(crawler.settings)
        self.crawler = crawler

    @classmethod
    def from_crawler(cls, crawler):
        return cls(crawler)

    def process_response(self, request, response, spider):
        if request.meta.get('dont_retry', False):
            return response
        elif response.status == 429:
            self.crawler.engine.pause()
            time.sleep(60) # If the rate limit is renewed in a minute, put 60 seconds, and so on.
            self.crawler.engine.unpause()
            reason = response_status_message(response.status)
            return self._retry(request, reason, spider) or response
        elif response.status in self.retry_http_codes:
            reason = response_status_message(response.status)
            return self._retry(request, reason, spider) or response
        return response 

Add 429 to retry codes in settings.py

RETRY_HTTP_CODES = [429]

Then activate it on settings.py. Don't forget to deactivate the default retry middleware.

DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES = {
    'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.retry.RetryMiddleware': None,
    'flat.middlewares.TooManyRequestsRetryMiddleware': 543,
}