Scraping in Python - Preventing IP ban

Question

I am using Python to scrape pages. Until now I didn't have any complicated issues.

The site that I'm trying to scrape uses a lot of security checks and have some mechanism to prevent scraping.

Using Requests and lxml I was able to scrape about 100-150 pages before getting banned by IP. Sometimes I even get ban on first request (new IP, not used before, different C block). I have tried with spoofing headers, randomize time between requests, still the same.

I have tried with Selenium and I got much better results. With Selenium I was able to scrape about 600-650 pages before getting banned. Here I have also tried to randomize requests (between 3-5 seconds, and make time.sleep(300) call on every 300th request). Despite that, Im getting banned.

From here I can conclude that site have some mechanism where they ban IP if it requested more than X pages in one open browser session or something like that.

Based on your experience what else should I try? Will closing and opening browser in Selenium help (for example after every 100th requests close and open browser). I was thinking about trying with proxies but there are about million of pages and it will be very expansive.

Answer 1

If you would switch to the Scrapy web-scraping framework, you would be able to reuse a number of things that were made to prevent and tackle banning:

• the built-in AutoThrottle extension:

This is an extension for automatically throttling crawling speed based on load of both the Scrapy server and the website you are crawling.

• rotating user agents with scrapy-fake-useragent middleware:

Use a random User-Agent provided by fake-useragent every request

• rotating IP addresses:

  • Setting Scrapy proxy middleware to rotate on each request
  • scrapy-proxies

• you can also run it via local proxy & TOR:

  • Scrapy: Run Using TOR and Multiple Agents

Answer 2

I had this problem too. I used urllib with tor in python3.

1. download and install tor browser
2. testing tor

open terminal and type:

curl --socks5-hostname localhost:9050 <http://site-that-blocked-you.com>

if you see result it's worked.

3. Now we should test in python. Now run this code

import socks
import socket
from urllib.request import Request, urlopen
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

#set socks5 proxy to use tor

socks.set_default_proxy(socks.SOCKS5, "localhost", 9050)
socket.socket = socks.socksocket
req = Request('http://check.torproject.org', headers={'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0', })
html = urlopen(req).read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
print(soup('title')[0].get_text())

if you see

Congratulations. This browser is configured to use Tor.

it worked in python too and this means you are using tor for web scraping.