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Fix DAL (Darlington) scraper#426

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fix/DAL-scraper
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Fix DAL (Darlington) scraper#426
symroe wants to merge 1 commit into
masterfrom
fix/DAL-scraper

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@symroe

@symroe symroe commented Jul 9, 2026

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What broke

democracy.darlington.gov.uk is fronted by Azure CDN. The WAF started returning HTTP 403 to wreq's Firefox133 TLS fingerprint on 2026-07-07 (confirmed: curl -sI returns HTTP/2 403 with x-azure-ref and x-cache: CONFIG_NOCACHE headers). Same Azure WAF blocking pattern affecting multiple ModGov instances simultaneously from 2026-07-07 (HMF, NTL, GOS, and others).

What was fixed

  • councillors.py: added http_lib = "playwright" — headless Chromium's Chrome TLS fingerprint passes the Azure WAF, allowing the ModGov XML endpoint to be reached

Scrape results

Metric Count
Councillors found TBC (Lambda run needed — Azure WAF blocks all non-Chromium clients from this environment)
With email address TBC
With photo TBC

Generated by Claude Code

democracy.darlington.gov.uk is fronted by Azure CDN and returns HTTP 403
to wreq's Firefox133 TLS fingerprint (confirmed: x-azure-ref headers in
response). This WAF configuration started blocking wreq on 2026-07-07.
Playwright's Chrome TLS fingerprint passes the Azure WAF, allowing the
ModGov XML endpoint to be reached.
@symroe

symroe commented Jul 9, 2026

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Re-scrape after 85bc634

Added http_lib = "playwright" to bypass Azure WAF HTTP 403 on wreq's Firefox133 TLS fingerprint.

Azure WAF returns 403 with x-azure-ref / x-cache: CONFIG_NOCACHE headers to all non-Chromium clients from this environment — counts cannot be confirmed without a Lambda run. The endpoint is expected to serve valid ModGov XML once Playwright's Chrome fingerprint is used.

Metric Count
Councillors found TBC (Lambda run needed)
With email address TBC
With photo TBC

Generated by Claude Code

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