Scrapy doesn't load HttpProxyMiddleware at startup

Question

I have created a new project as follow

scrapy startproject test
scrapy genspider test1 example.com

and change settings.py as follow:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

# Scrapy settings for test project
#
# For simplicity, this file contains only settings considered important or
# commonly used. You can find more settings consulting the documentation:
#
#     http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/topics/settings.html
#     http://scrapy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/downloader-middleware.html
#     http://scrapy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/spider-middleware.html

BOT_NAME = 'test'

SPIDER_MODULES = ['test.spiders']
NEWSPIDER_MODULE = 'test.spiders'


# Crawl responsibly by identifying yourself (and your website) on the user-agent
#USER_AGENT = 'test (+http://www.yourdomain.com)'

# Obey robots.txt rules
ROBOTSTXT_OBEY = True

# Configure maximum concurrent requests performed by Scrapy (default: 16)
#CONCURRENT_REQUESTS = 32

# Configure a delay for requests for the same website (default: 0)
# See http://scrapy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/settings.html#download-delay
# See also autothrottle settings and docs
#DOWNLOAD_DELAY = 3
# The download delay setting will honor only one of:
#CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_DOMAIN = 16
#CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_IP = 16

# Disable cookies (enabled by default)
#COOKIES_ENABLED = False

# Disable Telnet Console (enabled by default)
#TELNETCONSOLE_ENABLED = False

# Override the default request headers:
#DEFAULT_REQUEST_HEADERS = {
#   'Accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
#   'Accept-Language': 'en',
#}

# Enable or disable spider middlewares
# See http://scrapy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/spider-middleware.html
#SPIDER_MIDDLEWARES = {
#    'test.middlewares.MyCustomSpiderMiddleware': 543,
#}

# Enable or disable downloader middlewares
# See http://scrapy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/downloader-middleware.html
DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES = {
    'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpproxy.HttpProxyMiddleware': 110,
}

# Enable or disable extensions
# See http://scrapy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/extensions.html
#EXTENSIONS = {
#    'scrapy.extensions.telnet.TelnetConsole': None,
#}

# Configure item pipelines
# See http://scrapy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/item-pipeline.html
#ITEM_PIPELINES = {
#    'test.pipelines.SomePipeline': 300,
#}

# Enable and configure the AutoThrottle extension (disabled by default)
# See http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/topics/autothrottle.html
#AUTOTHROTTLE_ENABLED = True
# The initial download delay
#AUTOTHROTTLE_START_DELAY = 5
# The maximum download delay to be set in case of high latencies
#AUTOTHROTTLE_MAX_DELAY = 60
# The average number of requests Scrapy should be sending in parallel to
# each remote server
#AUTOTHROTTLE_TARGET_CONCURRENCY = 1.0
# Enable showing throttling stats for every response received:
#AUTOTHROTTLE_DEBUG = False

# Enable and configure HTTP caching (disabled by default)
# See http://scrapy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/topics/downloader-middleware.html#httpcache-middleware-settings
#HTTPCACHE_ENABLED = True
#HTTPCACHE_EXPIRATION_SECS = 0
#HTTPCACHE_DIR = 'httpcache'
#HTTPCACHE_IGNORE_HTTP_CODES = []
#HTTPCACHE_STORAGE = 'scrapy.extensions.httpcache.FilesystemCacheStorage'

as you can see, I set

DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES = {
    'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpproxy.HttpProxyMiddleware': 110,
}

but now, when I run the spider with scrapy crawl test1 I get the following output:

2017-02-15 20:37:52 [scrapy] INFO: Enabled extensions:
['scrapy.extensions.corestats.CoreStats',
 'scrapy.extensions.telnet.TelnetConsole',
 'scrapy.extensions.logstats.LogStats']
2017-02-15 20:37:52 [scrapy] INFO: Enabled downloader middlewares:
['scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.robotstxt.RobotsTxtMiddleware',
 'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpauth.HttpAuthMiddleware',
 'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.downloadtimeout.DownloadTimeoutMiddleware',
 'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.useragent.UserAgentMiddleware',
 'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.retry.RetryMiddleware',
 'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.defaultheaders.DefaultHeadersMiddleware',
 'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.redirect.MetaRefreshMiddleware',
 'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpcompression.HttpCompressionMiddleware',
 'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.redirect.RedirectMiddleware',
 'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.cookies.CookiesMiddleware',
 'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.chunked.ChunkedTransferMiddleware',
 'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.stats.DownloaderStats']
2017-02-15 20:37:52 [scrapy] INFO: Enabled spider middlewares:
['scrapy.spidermiddlewares.httperror.HttpErrorMiddleware',
 'scrapy.spidermiddlewares.offsite.OffsiteMiddleware',
 'scrapy.spidermiddlewares.referer.RefererMiddleware',
 'scrapy.spidermiddlewares.urllength.UrlLengthMiddleware',
 'scrapy.spidermiddlewares.depth.DepthMiddleware']

as you can see HttpProxyMiddleware is not being loaded.

Why HttpProxyMiddleware doesn't load?

Edit: I have installed scrapy 1.1.1

Answer 1

Currently (as of version 1.3.2), the HttpProxyMiddleware is not enabled if neither http_proxy or https_proxy environmental variables are defined (source).

However, that doesn't mean responses can't be downloaded through proxies. The example posted by @Granitosaurus works at the downloader handler level (source).

There is a recent PR, not released to PyPI yet, which enables the middleware by default and provides a setting (HTTPPROXY_ENABLED) to disable it if necessary.

Answer 2

Have you tried setting a proxy in spider?

Do it with request object like this

req = Request(**all params here**)
req.meta['proxy'] = "proxy ip here";
yield req

Answer 3

This middleware is enabled by default in DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES_BASE

see documentation of DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES_BASE

List of DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES_BASE values :

{
    'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.robotstxt.RobotsTxtMiddleware': 100,
    'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpauth.HttpAuthMiddleware': 300,
    'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.downloadtimeout.DownloadTimeoutMiddleware': 350,
    'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.defaultheaders.DefaultHeadersMiddleware': 400,
    'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.useragent.UserAgentMiddleware': 500,
    'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.retry.RetryMiddleware': 550,
    'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.ajaxcrawl.AjaxCrawlMiddleware': 560,
    'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.redirect.MetaRefreshMiddleware': 580,
    'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpcompression.HttpCompressionMiddleware': 590,
    'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.redirect.RedirectMiddleware': 600,
    'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.cookies.CookiesMiddleware': 700,
    'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpproxy.HttpProxyMiddleware': 750,
    'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.stats.DownloaderStats': 850,
    'scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpcache.HttpCacheMiddleware': 900,
}