Python Requests - How to Use & Rotate Proxies

In this guide for The Python Web Scraping Playbook, we will look at how to integrate the 3 most common types of proxies into our Python Requests based web scraper.

Using proxies with the Python Requests library allows you to spread your requests over multiple IP addresses making it harder for websites to detect & block your web scrapers.

In this guide we will walk you through the 3 most common proxy integration methods and show you how to use them with Python Requests:

If you would like to know how to integrate proxies into your Python Scrapy scrapers then check out our Scrapy proxies guide here.

Let's begin...

Using Proxy IPs With Python Requests

Using a proxy with Python requests is very straight forward. We simply need to create a proxies dictionary and pass it into the proxies attribute of our Python Requests request.

import requests

proxies = {
   'http': 'http://proxy.example.com:8080',
   'https': 'http://proxy.example.com:8081',
}

response = requests.get('http://example.com', proxies=proxies)

This method will work for all request methods Python Requests supports: GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH, HEAD.

Proxy Authentication With Python Requests

Some proxy IPs require authentication in the form of a username and password to use the proxy.

To add authenticate the proxy you have two options:

Add Username & Password to Proxy String

The first option is to simply add the username and password to the proxy strings.

import requests

proxies = {
   'http': 'http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@proxy.example.com:8080',
   'https': 'http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@proxy.example.com:8081',
}

response = requests.get('http://example.com', proxies=proxies)

Pass Username & Password to Auth Parameter

Python Requests allows you to authenicate your proxy by adding the username and password to the auth parameter.

import requests

proxies = {
   'http': 'http://proxy.example.com:8080',
   'https': 'http://proxy.example.com:8081',
}

response = requests.get('http://example.com', proxies=proxies auth=('USERNAME', 'PASSWORD'))

Using Proxies With Request Sessions

If you are using Python Requests Sessions functionality then you will need to add your proxy in a slightly different way.

Instead of defining the proxies in our requests.get() as we've seen previously, we will instead intialize our Requests session object and then set it to use our proxies.

import requests

session = requests.Session()

session.proxies = {
   'http': 'http://proxy.example.com:8080',
   'https': 'http://proxy.example.com:8081',
}

response = session.get('http://example.com')

Add Username & Password to Proxy String

To authenticate our proxy then again we can either add the username and password to the proxy strings.

session.proxies = {
   'http': 'http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@proxy.example.com:8080',
   'https': 'http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@proxy.example.com:8081',
}

Pass Username & Password to Auth Parameter

Or add the authentication to the session object.

session.auth = ('USERNAME', 'PASSWORD')

The 3 Most Common Proxy Formats

That covered the basics of integrating a proxy into Python Requests, in the next sections we will show you how to integrate Python Requests into the 3 most common proxy formats:

• Rotating Through List of Proxy IPs
• Using Proxy Gateways
• Using Proxy APIs

A couple of years ago, proxy providers would sell you a list of proxy IP addresses and you would configure your scraper to rotate through these IP addresses and use a new one with each request.

However, today more and more proxy providers don't sell raw lists of proxy IP addresses anymore. Instead providing access to their proxy pools via proxy gateways or proxy API endpoints.

We will look at how to integrate with all 3 proxy formats.

Proxy Integration #1: Rotating Through Proxy IP List

Here a proxy provider will normally provide you with a list of proxy IP addresses that you will need to configure your scraper to rotate through and select a new IP address for every request.

The proxy list you recieve will look something like this:

'http://Username:Password@85.237.57.198:20000',
'http://Username:Password@85.237.57.198:21000',
'http://Username:Password@85.237.57.198:22000',
'http://Username:Password@85.237.57.198:23000',

To integrate them into our scrapers we need to configure our code to pick a random proxy from this list everytime we make a request.

In our Python Requests scraper we could do it like this:

import requests
from random import randint

proxy_list = [
  'http://Username:Password@85.237.57.198:20000',
  'http://Username:Password@85.237.57.198:21000',
  'http://Username:Password@85.237.57.198:22000',
  'http://Username:Password@85.237.57.198:23000',
              ]

proxy_index = randint(0, len(proxy_list) - 1)

proxies = {
  "http://": proxy_list[proxy_index],
  "https://": proxy_list[proxy_index],
}

r = requests.get(url='https://example.com/', proxies=proxies)
print(r.text)

This is a simplistic example, as when scraping at scale we would also need to build a mechanism to monitor the performance of each individual IP address and remove it from the proxy rotation if it got banned or blocked.

Proxy Integration #2: Using Proxy Gateway

Increasingly, a lot of proxy providers aren't selling lists of proxy IP addresses anymore. Instead, they give you access to their proxy pools via a proxy gateway.

Here, you only have to integrate a single proxy into your Python Requests scraper and the proxy provider will manage the proxy rotation, selection, cleaning, etc. on their end for you.

This is the most common way to use residential and mobile proxies, and becoming increasingly common when using datacenter proxies too.

Here is an example of how to integrate BrightData's residential proxy gateway into our Python Requests scraper:

import requests

proxies = {
   'http': 'http://zproxy.lum-superproxy.io:22225',
   'https': 'http://zproxy.lum-superproxy.io:22225',
}

url = 'http://example.com/'

response = requests.get(url, proxies=proxies, auth=('USERNAME', 'PASSWORD'))

As you can see, it is much easier to integrate than using a proxy list as you don't have to worry about implementing all the proxy rotation logic.

Proxy Integration #3: Using Proxy API Endpoint

Recently, a lot of proxy providers have started offering smart proxy APIs that take care of managing your proxy infrastructure for you by rotating proxies and headers for you so you can focus on extracting the data you need.

Here you typically, send the URL you want to scrape to their API endpoint and then they will return the HTML response.

Although every proxy API provider has a slightly different API integration, they are all very similar and are very easy to integrate with.

Here is an example of how to integrate with the ScrapeOps Proxy Manager:

import requests
from urllib.parse import urlencode

payload = {'api_key': 'APIKEY', 'url': 'https://httpbin.org/ip'}
r = requests.get('https://proxy.scrapeops.io/v1/', params=urlencode(payload))
print r.text

Here you simply send the URL you want to scrape to the ScrapeOps API endpoint in the URL query parameter, along with your API key in the api_key query parameter, and ScrapeOps will deal with finding the best proxy for that domain and return the HTML response to you.

You can get your own free API key with 1,000 free requests by signing up here.

More Web Scraping Tutorials

So that's how you can integrate proxies into your Python Requests scrapers.

If you would like to learn more about Web Scraping, then be sure to check out The Web Scraping Playbook.

Or check out one of our more in-depth guides:

• How to Scrape The Web Without Getting Blocked Guide
• The State of Web Scraping 2020
• The Ethics of Web Scraping