Scrapy doesn't return start_urls as an item -

using following code, can scrapy crawl pages of site, parse pages , return results of each page parse item processing in pipeline.

my issue cannot work out how process start_url page. start_url never gets passed parse_item function.

what missing?

class genericspider(crawlspider):     name = "generic"     allowed_domains = []     start_urls = []  ignored_extensions = [     # images     'mng', 'pct', 'bmp', 'gif', 'jpg', 'jpeg', 'png', 'pst', 'psp', 'tif',     'tiff', 'ai', 'drw', 'dxf', 'eps', 'ps', 'svg',      # audio     'mp3', 'wma', 'ogg', 'wav', 'ra', 'aac', 'mid', 'au', 'aiff',      # office suites     'xls', 'xlsx', 'ppt', 'pptx', 'doc', 'docx', 'odt', 'ods', 'odg', 'odp',      # other     'css', 'exe', 'bin', 'rss', 'zip', 'rar', ]   rules = [     rule(linkextractor(deny_extensions=ignored_extensions), follow=true, callback='parse_item') ]  def __init__(self, start_url, source, *args, **kwargs):     super(genericspider, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)       #set common settings     bootstrap.init(self, kwargs)      self.source = source     self.start_urls = [start_url]     self.allowed_domains = [urlparse.urlparse(start_url).hostname]  def parse_item(self, response):     process response , return item .... 

you'll want define parse_start_url, following should do:

class genericspider(crawlspider):     name = "generic"     allowed_domains = []     start_urls = []     ...     def parse_item(self, response):         process response , return item ....      parse_start_url = parse_item