scrapy-crawlera 1.6 documentation

scrapy-crawlera is a Scrapy Downloader Middleware to interact with Crawlera automatically.


  • Add the Crawlera middleware including it into the DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES in your file:

        'scrapy_crawlera.CrawleraMiddleware': 610
  • Then there are two ways to enable it

    • Through

      CRAWLERA_APIKEY = 'apikey'
    • Through spider attributes:

      class MySpider:
          crawlera_enabled = True
          crawlera_apikey = 'apikey'
  • (optional) If you are not using the default Crawlera proxy (, for example if you have a dedicated or private instance, make sure to also set CRAWLERA_URL in, e.g.:


How to use it

All configurable Scrapy Settings added by the Middleware.

With the middleware, the usage of crawlera is automatic, every request will go through crawlera without nothing to worry about. If you want to disable crawlera on a specific Request, you can do so by updating meta with dont_proxy=True:

        'dont_proxy': True,

Remember that you are now making requests to Crawlera, and the Crawlera service will be the one actually making the requests to the different sites.

If you need to specify special Crawlera Headers, just apply them as normal Scrapy Headers.

Here we have an example of specifying a Crawlera header into a Scrapy request:

        'X-Crawlera-Max-Retries': 1,

Remember that you could also set which headers to use by default by all requests with DEFAULT_REQUEST_HEADERS


Crawlera headers are removed from requests when the middleware is activated but Crawlera is disabled. For example, if you accidentally disable Crawlera via crawlera_enabled = False but keep sending X-Crawlera-* headers in your requests, those will be removed from the request headers.

This Middleware also adds some configurable Scrapy Settings, check the complete list here.

All the rest

See what has changed in recent scrapy-crawlera versions.