Wrote an errback for my Scrapy spider, but tracebacks also keep happening, why? - scrapy

Question

I am using Scrapy 1.1 and I call Scrapy from within a script. My spider launching method looks like this:
def run_spider(self):
runner = CrawlerProcess(get_project_settings())
spider = SiteSpider()
configure_logging()
d = runner.crawl(spider, websites_file=self.raw_data_file)
d.addBoth(lambda _: reactor.stop())
reactor.run()
Here is an extract of my spider with an errback written as in the documentation, but it only prints when catches a failure.
class SiteSpider(scrapy.Spider):
name = 'SiteCrawler'
custom_settings = {
'FEED_FORMAT': 'json',
'FEED_URI': 'result.json',
}
def __init__(self, websites_file=None, *args, **kwargs):
super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
self.websites_file = websites_file
print('***********')
print(self.websites_file)
def start_requests(self):
.....
if is_valid_url(website_url):
yield scrapy.Request(url=website_url, callback=self.parse, errback=self.handle_errors, meta={'url': account_id})
def parse(self, response):
.....
yield item
def handle_errors(self, failure):
if failure.check(HttpError):
# these exceptions come from HttpError spider middleware
# you can get the non-200 response
response = failure.value.response
print('HttpError on ' + response.url)
elif failure.check(DNSLookupError):
# this is the original request
request = failure.request
print('DNSLookupError on ' + request.url)
elif failure.check(TimeoutError, TCPTimedOutError):
request = failure.request
print('TimeoutError on ' + request.url)
My problem is that I get errors I expect, like:
TimeoutError on http://www.example.com
But also get tracebacks for the same websites:
2016-08-05 13:40:55 [scrapy] ERROR: Error downloading <GET http://www.example.com/robots.txt>: TCP connection timed out: 60: Operation timed out.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File ".../anaconda/lib/python3.5/site-packages/twisted/internet/defer.py", line 1126, in _inlineCallbacks
result = result.throwExceptionIntoGenerator(g)
File ".../anaconda/lib/python3.5/site-packages/twisted/python/failure.py", line 389, in throwExceptionIntoGenerator
return g.throw(self.type, self.value, self.tb)
File ".../anaconda/lib/python3.5/site-packages/scrapy/core/downloader/middleware.py", line 43, in process_request
defer.returnValue((yield download_func(request=request,spider=spider)))
twisted.internet.error.TCPTimedOutError: TCP connection timed out: 60: Operation timed out.
The written exception handling messages and the tracebacks can often be traced to the same websites. After searching a lot on stackoverflow, in the docs and the likes I still dont know why I see the tracebacks.
This also occurs with DNSLookupErrors for example.
Excuse me, my Scrapy knowledge is juvenile. Is this normal behavior?
Also, I added this to settings.py, which is under my crawler. Other entires (for example the item_pipelines) most exactly work.
LOG_LEVEL = 'WARNING'
But I still see debug messages, not only warnings and everything above that. (if configure_logging() is added to the spider launch) I am running this from terminal on mac os x.
I would be very happy to get any help with this.

Answer 1

Try this in a script:
if __name__ == '__main__':
runner = CrawlerProcess(get_project_settings())
spider = SiteSpider()
configure_logging()
d = runner.crawl(spider, websites_file=self.raw_data_file)
d.addBoth(lambda _: reactor.stop())
reactor.run()