Just opened scrapy/scrapy#4993 to make this easier.

Hi @elacuesta thanks for taking care of the request.
I've looked at your PR #4993, it can be useful sure, but it seems that this approach won't solve the issue with this particular CrawleraFetchMiddleware. Two points that I have in mind:

1. The existing RetryMiddleware is activated only with this condition:
   if response.status in self.retry_http_codes:
   but in some cases, the response code for "bad" response from CrawleraFetchMiddleware is 200 and this won't be retried even if we need it. "Bad" response means that the response has server_error or json decode error
2. Also for some cases the request has URL 'https://cm-54.scrapinghub.com/fetch/v2' and the original URL that we need to retry is only in meta. In this case, this will be retried incorrectly.

What do you think about adding something like existing approach

if self.raise_on_error:

    raise CrawleraFetchException(log_msg) from exc

elif self.retry_on_error:

    raise CrawleraRetryException(log_msg) from exc

else

    logger.warning(log_msg)

return response

and implement this CrawleraRetryException separately.

cc @Gallaecio @noviluni @ogiaquino

Hey @PyExplorer! My idea for subclassing the built-in middleware is actually to take advantage of the private _retry method, which handles several things like stats and maximum retries. One alternative we considered in the OSS meeting is closing scrapy/scrapy#4993 in favour of Adrian's scrapy/scrapy#4902, I will suggest some changes to the latter so we can also have customizable stats and the like.

Hey @elacuesta I see that scrapy/scrapy#4902 is merged 🎉 Would be good to leverage that and implement the retry functionality in the middleware since there are growing use cases that warrant it.

Indeed @akshayphilar, my plan is to work on this next week 👍

Also for some cases the request has URL 'https://cm-54.scrapinghub.com/fetch/v2' and the original URL that we need to retry is only in meta. In this case, this will be retried incorrectly

@PyExplorer why do you need to retry the original url? I would think that if request to uncork API fails we should retry request to uncork API, and not to target website.

re:

The existing RetryMiddleware is activated only with this condition:
if response.status in self.retry_http_codes: but in some cases, the response code for "bad" response from CrawleraFetchMiddleware is 200 and this won't be retried even if we need it. "Bad" response means that the response has server_error or json decode error

I see this as a bug in Uncork API. It should not return 200 if something fails. If there is a failed response, uncork did not bring good results it should return 503 service unavailable, this is what some other products from Zyte are doing e.g. Smart Proxy Manager.

This way we could handle Fetch API 5** codes with default built in Scrapy middleware and there will be no need for separate PR by @elacuesta. And retrying 5** codes should be a default behaviour of middleware. Raising errors is not a good default. Most users will want to get retried response in case of Uncork failure not error in logs.