scrapy how to set referer url

Question

I need to set the referer url, before scraping a site, the site uses refering url based Authentication, so it does not allow me to login if the referer is not valid.

Could someone tell how to do this in Scrapy?

Answer 1

Just set Referer url in the Request headers

class scrapy.http.Request(url[, method='GET', body, headers, ...

headers (dict) – the headers of this request. The dict values can be strings (for single valued headers) or lists (for multi-valued headers).

Example:

return Request(url=your_url, headers={'Referer':'http://your_referer_url'})

Answer 2

Override BaseSpider.start_requests and create there your custom Request passing it your referer header.

Answer 3

If you want to change the referer in your spider's request, you can change DEFAULT_REQUEST_HEADERS in the settings.py file:

DEFAULT_REQUEST_HEADERS = {
    'Referer': 'http://www.google.com' 
}

Answer 4

You should do exactly as @warwaruk indicated, below is my example elaboration for a crawl spider:

from scrapy.spiders import CrawlSpider
from scrapy import Request

class MySpider(CrawlSpider):
  name = "myspider"
  allowed_domains = ["example.com"]
  start_urls = [
      'http://example.com/foo'
      'http://example.com/bar'
      'http://example.com/baz'
      ]
  rules = [(...)]

  def start_requests(self):
    requests = []
    for item in self.start_urls:
      requests.append(Request(url=item, headers={'Referer':'http://www.example.com/'}))
    return requests    

  def parse_me(self, response):
    (...)

This should generate following logs in your terminal:

(...)
[myspider] DEBUG: Crawled (200) <GET http://example.com/foo> (referer: http://www.example.com/)
(...)
[myspider] DEBUG: Crawled (200) <GET http://example.com/bar> (referer: http://www.example.com/)
(...)
[myspider] DEBUG: Crawled (200) <GET http://example.com/baz> (referer: http://www.example.com/)
(...)

Will work same with BaseSpider. In the end start_requests method is BaseSpider method, from which CrawlSpider inherits from.

Documentation explains more options to be set in Request apart from headers, such as: cookies , callback function, priority of the request etc.