Ruby Web Crawler Development Beginner to Proficient

First, crawl worm novice village: first understand why to use the proxy IP

Just play Ruby crawler that time, buddy you may have encountered this situation: the code is clearly no problem, why suddenly can not open the page? At this time, it is likely that the website blocked your IP. To give a real example, last year there is a price comparison tool for friends, with a single IP grabbing e-commerce data, the results of half an hour on the blacklist, the entire project directly cool.

This is the time to sacrifice the proxy IP this big killer. It's like saying you're going to the supermarket to grab a limited number of items, always using the same face to go to the line, the security guards do not stare at you to stare at who?Proxy IPs allow you to access them with a different face each time.The dynamic IP pool of the ipipgo family can do automatic face changing per request, which is personally tested to improve the collection efficiency by more than 3 times.

Second, practical skills: Ruby to play the correct posture of the proxy IP

Let's start with some real code, this is the classic configuration that our team is using:

require 'net/http'
proxy_addr = 'gateway.ipipgo.com'
proxy_port = 9021

uri = URI('https://目标网站.com')
Net::HTTP.start(uri.host, uri.port,
  proxy_addr, proxy_port, use_ssl: true) do
  use_ssl: true) do |http|
  response = http.get(uri.request_uri)
  puts response.body
end

Notice there's a pit here:Never write a dead proxy address in your code! It is recommended to use the API provided by ipipgo to get it dynamically, their interface return format is especially Ruby-friendly, and it works by parsing JSON directly.

Third, to avoid the pit guide: these tawdry operation must not try to

I've seen people stuffing free proxy lists directly into their code, and what happens? 8 out of 10 IPs can't connect, and the remaining 2 are as fast as a snail's pace. What's more, some proxies willSneakily modifying response content, resulting in data misalignment they don't even know about yet.

A reliable approach is to choose a commercial service, such as ipipgo, with automatic quality detection. They have a smart routing feature that is quite impressive, automatically assigning IPs in the same city according to the geographic location of the target site, and the measured latency can be reduced to less than 200ms.

Fourth, the difficult QA: reptile old drivers will also turn over the car problem

Q: What should I do if I use a proxy and still get blocked?
A: Check if the request header has browser fingerprints, it is recommended to use mechanize library to simulate real browsers. ipipgo's enterprise version supports request header obfuscation, which can automatically generate different device features.

Q: What should I do if the proxy IP suddenly fails to connect?
A: Add a retry mechanism in the code, it is recommended to use ipipgo's alternate gateway function to automatically switch the alternate channel when it encounters a timeout.

Q：What should I do if I need to manage thousands of IPs at the same time?
A: Directly on ipipgo's cluster management API, which supports batch creation/destruction of sessions, and can also set up IP rotation policies, our team uses this feature to handle over a billion requests.

V. Performance Metaphysics: Make Your Crawlers Fly

Here's a tawdry operation: connect the IP pool of ipipgo to the Sidekiq task queue. We have tested, with 10 workers running at the same time, with automatic IP switching, collection speed directly take off. But be careful not to crash the site, remember to add a random delay in the code.

One last crushing tip:Storing ipipgo's IP usage logs with Redis. Tagging each IP to record the number of times it is used, response time and other metrics, and automatically eliminating poorly performing IPs, this solution allowed our crawler survival rate to soar from 601 TP3T to 951 TP3T.

Playing with crawlers is like playing guerrilla warfare, and proxy IPs are your camouflage. It's important to pick the right tool, and ipipgo can really hit it out of the park in the stability and stealth department. Remember.Don't be cheap and use free proxies, data security is the real money. What you do not understand is welcome to tease, the old driver to take you around the bend!