Everything You Need to Know About Using A Proxy in Scrapy

Web scraping can be time taking, especially when you don’t use a proxy. But nowadays, you won’t see anyone scraping without a proxy, because a proxy for Scrapy is essential. It acts as the tunnel that hides your footsteps on the internet and puts a mask over your identity. It redirects all the attention on you to other IP so that you can stay safe and secured. One of the best tools for scraping online is known as Scrapy. To use proxy and Scrapy together, you first need to set up the proxy. Once you do that, the scraping becomes so easy and efficient, and your speed of requests in scraping also increases significantly.

But how does that happen? And what are the benefits of using it? To answer these questions, we will talk about everything you need to know about using a proxy in Scrapy.

What Is Scrapy — Why You Should Use It?

Scrapy was designed originally for web scraping. However, it can also collect data through APIs, or used as a general web crawler. It’s the best friend of scrapers today, and it’s written in python. You need to understand the basic of programming or need to learn from a professional to use it well. However, people get confused about how they can set up their proxy for Scrapy.

These days, you will hardly see a scraper who doesn’t know about Scrapy, because most of them even use it or have used it in the past. But how exactly can you set this up without paying someone to do it for you?

Also, when scraping the web at a large scale, you often run into some problems and challenges you must overcome. You may need to access a site from another region, which makes you wish you had a different IP. Sometimes, you may need to work with anti-both solutions. No matter the case, proxies are best to overcome all such problems and are considered necessary for scraping.

Why and How to Use Proxies in Scrapy?

If you are web scraping or collecting data through APIs at a large scale, you probably know the answer. Websites can target you when you are collecting data through their site and can ban your IP. Because most of the sites have restricted such things in their policy, your actions are considered harmful and illegal; however, that’s not true. When you web scrape using Scrapy, your actions are totally legal and ethical, but it won’t stop them from banning.

Once your scraper gets banned, it not only stops your work but also affects the businesses you were helping. The flow of information you were getting stops suddenly. While on the other hand, some websites display different information depending on your region. So, you need to overcome regional restrictions and get most of the web scraping, which means using a proxy. Proxies are a perfect addition in Scrapy, and it can boost your work by a lot. But to start, you will need to set up a proxy for Scrapy, and here we have some methods for you.

Set Up A Proxy in Scrapy

If you know how to use Scrapy, then this step becomes easy for you. Overall, there are two methods, and both of them work perfectly. They are as follows.

1. Method 1

In Scrapy, there is a middleware enabled by default, which helps you set up the proxy you use. Under normal circumstances, you send a request in Scrapy by sending the target URL and also callback function. But if you want to use a proxy, then you send the URL as a meta parameter. Like;

meta={“proxy”: “http://192.168.1.1:8050"})

which is sent at the end as a meta to direct the request with a different IP from the proxy.

2. Method 2

You can also create your middleware, which is more complicated and challenging for starters. People who make their middleware are mostly professionals who want the solution to be more modular and isolated. Just like the first method, you need to send the URL as meta parameter, but the commands are different and complex.

In the code, you need to define the proxy URL, and also the information for necessary authentication. But before you start, make sure that your middleware is enabled in the settings.

Verifying If Your Proxy Set Up Is Complete

After you complete the setup, you need to verify whether its working or not. To do this successfully, you need to perform scraping on a test site that tells you your IP and its location. If the site shows you a different IP, that is not traced to your computer, then the setup is correct.

Rotating Proxies Are Essential for Scrapy

Now that you finished all steps and successfully set up the proxy for Scrapy, you may think you are done. However, IP banning and restrictions may still come when you use individual IP for too long. In which case, you need to keep your proxies in rotation. There are ways to do this on Scrapy, and once you do this, you can perform tasks even better without worries.

IP rotation or proxy’s rotation is when each request is attached with a random IP from your pool of proxies. This randomness can remove all chances of banning, and you can scrape safely for a long time. Usually, you won’t change the IP until you are banned, and doing this so many times can slow down your work, and cause annoyance. However, with just a few codes on Scrapy, you can have an automatic system for this work. You need to enable the middleware and just add the proxies as a list to your settings. There are other options and custom things you can do in settings also.

Conclusion

Scraping becomes more comfortable with Scrapy, but when you use a proxy for Scrapy, it becomes secure as well. You can perform various tasks with them together, and not have to worry about IP banning due to the proxy.

So, now that you know how to set up the proxy in Scrapy, you can do your projects. The best is that you won’t be a victim to any of the problems along the way, and perform the tasks smoothly.