How do I handle timeouts in Scrapy?

Scrapy handles timeouts with the DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT setting. This setting is used to set a delay in seconds before timing out while downloading a webpage. If a request doesn’t finish within that time, the request is considered as a failure and is closed.

The default value is 180 seconds, i.e., 3 minutes. However, you can adjust this setting according to your needs.

Here is an example of how to set DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT in your Scrapy settings:

# settings.py
DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT = 500  # set timeout to 500 seconds

You can also set the download timeout per spider by updating download_timeout spider attribute.

class MySpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = 'my_spider'
    download_timeout = 500

Or, you can set it per request using the meta argument:

yield scrapy.Request(url, meta={'download_timeout': 500})

Remember, if the download timeout is hit, the request's errback is called with a twisted.internet.error.TimeoutError exception. So, you can catch that exception in your errback to handle it.

def parse(self, response):
    # Parsing logic here
    pass

def handle_error(self, failure):
    # Error handling logic here
    if failure.check(TimeoutError):
        self.logger.error('Request timed out.')

yield scrapy.Request(url, callback=self.parse, errback=self.handle_error)

Remember that DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT will not be applied for the first byte of the server's response; it will only be enforced after the first byte has been received.

In addition, DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT is not the only time-related setting in Scrapy. There are others like DOWNLOAD_DELAY, DOWNLOAD_MAXSIZE, DOWNLOAD_WARNSIZE, and DOWNLOAD_FAIL_ON_DATALOSS that you can use to effectively manage your Scrapy spiders.