How to connect to https site with Scrapy via Polipo over TOR?

Question

Not entirely sure what the problem is here.

Running Python 2.7.3, and Scrapy 0.16.5

I've created a very simple Scrapy spider to test connecting to my local Polipo proxy so I can send requests out via TOR. Basic code of my spider is as follows:

from scrapy.spider import BaseSpider

class TorSpider(BaseSpider):
    name = "tor"
    allowed_domains = ["check.torproject.org"]
    start_urls = [
        "https://check.torproject.org"
    ]

    def parse(self, response):
        print response.body

For my proxy middleware, I've defined:

class ProxyMiddleware(object):
    def process_request(self, request, spider):
        request.meta['proxy'] = settings.get('HTTP_PROXY')

My HTTP_PROXY in my settings file is defined as HTTP_PROXY = 'http://localhost:8123'.

Now, if I change my start URL to http://check.torproject.org, everything works fine, no problems.

If I attempt to run against https://check.torproject.org, I get a 400 Bad Request error every time (I've also tried different https:// sites, and all of them have the same problem):

2013-07-23 21:36:18+0100 [scrapy] INFO: Scrapy 0.16.5 started (bot: arachnid)
2013-07-23 21:36:18+0100 [scrapy] DEBUG: Enabled extensions: LogStats, TelnetConsole, CloseSpider, WebService, CoreStats, SpiderState
2013-07-23 21:36:18+0100 [scrapy] DEBUG: Enabled downloader middlewares: HttpAuthMiddleware, DownloadTimeoutMiddleware, RandomUserAgentMiddleware, ProxyMiddleware, RetryMiddleware, DefaultHeadersMiddleware, RedirectMiddleware, CookiesMiddleware, HttpCompressionMiddleware, ChunkedTransferMiddleware, DownloaderStats
2013-07-23 21:36:18+0100 [scrapy] DEBUG: Enabled spider middlewares: HttpErrorMiddleware, OffsiteMiddleware, RefererMiddleware, UrlLengthMiddleware, DepthMiddleware
2013-07-23 21:36:18+0100 [scrapy] DEBUG: Enabled item pipelines: 
2013-07-23 21:36:18+0100 [tor] INFO: Spider opened
2013-07-23 21:36:18+0100 [tor] INFO: Crawled 0 pages (at 0 pages/min), scraped 0 items (at 0 items/min)
2013-07-23 21:36:18+0100 [scrapy] DEBUG: Telnet console listening on 0.0.0.0:6023
2013-07-23 21:36:18+0100 [scrapy] DEBUG: Web service listening on 0.0.0.0:6080
2013-07-23 21:36:18+0100 [tor] DEBUG: Retrying <GET https://check.torproject.org> (failed 1 times): 400 Bad Request
2013-07-23 21:36:18+0100 [tor] DEBUG: Retrying <GET https://check.torproject.org> (failed 2 times): 400 Bad Request
2013-07-23 21:36:18+0100 [tor] DEBUG: Gave up retrying <GET https://check.torproject.org> (failed 3 times): 400 Bad Request
2013-07-23 21:36:18+0100 [tor] DEBUG: Crawled (400) <GET https://check.torproject.org> (referer: None)
2013-07-23 21:36:18+0100 [tor] INFO: Closing spider (finished)

And just to double check that it isn't something wrong with my TOR/Polipo set up, I'm able to run the following curl command in a terminal, and connect fine: curl --proxy localhost:8123 https://check.torproject.org/

Any suggestions as to what's wrong here?

Answer 1

Try

rq.meta['proxy'] = 'http://127.0.0.1:8123'

In my case it's works