web-scrapingscrapyquora

How can I use Scrapy to download all my Quora answers?

I'm trying to use Scrapy to download my Quora answers, but I can't even seem to be able to download my page. Using the simple

scrapy shell 'http://it.quora.com/profile/Ferdinando-Randisi'

returns this error

2017-10-05 22:16:52 [scrapy.utils.log] INFO: Scrapy 1.4.0 started (bot: quora)
2017-10-05 22:16:52 [scrapy.utils.log] INFO: Overridden settings: {'NEWSPIDER_MODULE': 'quora.spiders', 'ROBOTSTXT_OBEY': True, 'DUPEFILTER_CLASS': 'scrapy.dupefilters.BaseDupeFilter', 'SPIDER_MODULES': \[quora.spiders'], 'BOT_NAME': 'quora', 'LOGSTATS_INTERVAL': 0}
....
2017-10-05 22:16:53 [scrapy.middleware] INFO: Enabled item pipelines:
[]
2017-10-05 22:16:53 [scrapy.extensions.telnet] DEBUG: Telnet console listening on 127.0.0.1:6023
2017-10-05 22:16:53 [scrapy.core.engine] INFO: Spider opened
2017-10-05 22:16:54 [scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.redirect] DEBUG: Redirecting (301) to <GET https://it.quora.com/robots.txt> from <GET http://it.quora.com/robots.txt>
2017-10-05 22:16:55 [scrapy.core.engine] DEBUG: Crawled (429) <GET https://it.quora.com/robots.txt> (referer: None)
2017-10-05 22:16:55 [scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.redirect] DEBUG: Redirecting (301) to <GET https://it.quora.com/profile/Ferdinando-Randisi> from <GET http://it.quora.com/profile/Ferdinando-Randisi>
2017-10-05 22:16:56 [scrapy.core.engine] DEBUG: Crawled (429) <GET https://it.quora.com/profile/Ferdinando-Randisi> (referer: None)
2017-10-05 22:16:58 [root] DEBUG: Using default logger

What's wrong? Error 429 is associated with too many requests, but I'm making only one request. Why would that be too many?

Solution

  • It blocks Scrapy based on user agent string. Try to mimic e.g. Chromium:

    scrapy shell "http://it.quora.com/profile/Ferdinando-Randisi" -s USER_AGENT="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/28.0.1500.52 Safari/537.36"