Using urllib2 with SOCKS proxy

Question

Is it possible to fetch pages with urllib2 through a SOCKS proxy on a one socks server per opener basic? I've seen the solution using setdefaultproxy method, but I need to have different socks in different openers.

So there is SocksiPy library, which works great, but it has to be used this way:

import socks
import socket
socket.socket = socks.socksocket
import urllib2
socks.setdefaultproxy(socks.PROXY_TYPE_SOCKS5, "x.x.x.x", y)

That is, it sets the same proxy for ALL urllib2 requests. How can I have different proxies for different openers?

Answer 1

Try with pycurl:

import pycurl
c1 = pycurl.Curl()
c1.setopt(pycurl.URL, 'http://www.google.com')
c1.setopt(pycurl.PROXY, 'localhost')
c1.setopt(pycurl.PROXYPORT, 8080)
c1.setopt(pycurl.PROXYTYPE, pycurl.PROXYTYPE_SOCKS5)

c2 = pycurl.Curl()
c2.setopt(pycurl.URL, 'http://www.yahoo.com')
c2.setopt(pycurl.PROXY, 'localhost')
c2.setopt(pycurl.PROXYPORT, 8081)
c2.setopt(pycurl.PROXYTYPE, pycurl.PROXYTYPE_SOCKS5)

c1.perform() 
c2.perform() 

Answer 2

Yes, you can. I repeat my answer on How can I use a SOCKS 4/5 proxy with urllib2? You need to create an opener for every proxy like you do with an http proxy. The code for adding this feature to SocksiPy is available in GitHub https://gist.github.com/869791 and is as simple as:

opener = urllib2.build_opener(SocksiPyHandler(socks.PROXY_TYPE_SOCKS4, 'localhost', 9999))
print opener.open('http://www.whatismyip.com/automation/n09230945.asp').read()

For more information I've written an example running multiple Tor instances to behave like a rotating proxy: Distributed Scraping With Multiple Tor Circuits