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Version: 3.4

Proxy Management

IP address blocking is one of the oldest and most effective ways of preventing access to a website. It is therefore paramount for a good web scraping library to provide easy to use but powerful tools which can work around IP blocking. The most powerful weapon in our anti IP blocking arsenal is a proxy server.

With Crawlee we can use our own proxy servers or proxy servers acquired from third-party providers.

Quick start​

If we already have proxy URLs of our own, we can start using them immediately in only a few lines of code.

import { ProxyConfiguration } from 'crawlee';

const proxyConfiguration = new ProxyConfiguration({
    proxyUrls: [
        'http://proxy-1.com',
        'http://proxy-2.com',
    ]
});
const proxyUrl = await proxyConfiguration.newUrl();

Examples of how to use our proxy URLs with crawlers are shown below in Crawler integration section.

Proxy Configuration​

All our proxy needs are managed by the ProxyConfiguration class. We create an instance using the ProxyConfiguration constructor function based on the provided options. See the ProxyConfigurationOptions for all the possible constructor options.

Crawler integration​

ProxyConfiguration integrates seamlessly into HttpCrawler, CheerioCrawler, JSDOMCrawler, PlaywrightCrawler and PuppeteerCrawler.

import { CheerioCrawler, ProxyConfiguration } from 'crawlee';

const proxyConfiguration = new ProxyConfiguration({
    proxyUrls: [
        'http://proxy-1.com',
        'http://proxy-2.com',
    ],
});

const crawler = new CheerioCrawler({
    proxyConfiguration,
    // ...
});

Our crawlers will now use the selected proxies for all connections.

IP Rotation and session management​

​proxyConfiguration.newUrl() allows us to pass a sessionId parameter. It will then be used to create a sessionId-proxyUrl pair, and subsequent newUrl() calls with the same sessionId will always return the same proxyUrl. This is extremely useful in scraping, because we want to create the impression of a real user. See the session management guide and SessionPool class for more information on how keeping a real session helps us avoid blocking.

When no sessionId is provided, our proxy URLs are rotated round-robin.

import { CheerioCrawler, ProxyConfiguration } from 'crawlee';

const proxyConfiguration = new ProxyConfiguration({ /* opts */ });

const crawler = new CheerioCrawler({
    useSessionPool: true,
    persistCookiesPerSession: true,
    proxyConfiguration,
    // ...
});

Inspecting current proxy in Crawlers​

HttpCrawler, CheerioCrawler, JSDOMCrawler, PlaywrightCrawler and PuppeteerCrawler grant access to information about the currently used proxy in their requestHandler using a proxyInfo object. With the proxyInfo object, we can easily access the proxy URL.

import { CheerioCrawler, ProxyConfiguration } from 'crawlee';

const proxyConfiguration = new ProxyConfiguration({ /* opts */ });

const crawler = new CheerioCrawler({
    proxyConfiguration,
    async requestHandler({ proxyInfo }) {
        console.log(proxyInfo);
    },
    // ...
});