Scrapy and persistent cookie manager middleware

By andre

August 3, 2015

Scrapy is a nice python environment for web scraping, i.e. extracting information from web sites automatically by crawling them. It works best with anonymous data discovery, but nothing stops you from having active sessions as well. In fact, scrapy transparently manages cookies, which are usually used to track user sessions. Unfortunately, the sessions don’t survive between runs. This, however, can be fixed quite easily by adding custom cookie middleware. Here is an example:

from __future__ import absolute_import

import os
import os.path
import logging
import pickle

from scrapy.http.cookies import CookieJar

from scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.cookies import CookiesMiddleware

import settings as settings

class PersistentCookiesMiddleware(CookiesMiddleware):
    def __init__(self, debug=False):
        super(PersistentCookiesMiddleware, self).__init__(debug)
        self.load()
    
    def process_response(self, request, response, spider):
        # TODO: optimize so that we don't do it on every response
        res = super(PersistentCookiesMiddleware, self).process_response(request, response, spider)
        self.save()
        return res
    
    def getPersistenceFile(self):
        return settings.COOKIES_STORAGE_FILE

    def save(self):
        logging.debug("Saving cookies to disk for reuse")
        with open(self.getPersistenceFile(), "wb") as f:
            pickle.dump(self.jars, f)
            f.flush()

    def load(self):
        filename = self.getPersistenceFile()
        logging.debug("Trying to load cookies from file '{0}'".format(filename))
        if not os.path.exists(filename):
            logging.info("File '{0}' for cookie reload doesn't exist".format(filename))
            return
        if not os.path.isfile(filename):
            raise Exception("File '{0}' is not a regular file".format(filename))

        with open(filename, "rb") as f:
            self.jars = pickle.load(f)

Then configure your spider to use the new middleware in settings.py:

DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES = {
    'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.cookies.CookiesMiddleware': None,
    'middlewares.cookies.PersistentCookiesMiddleware': 701,
}

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