Beginner: I'm new to scraping and being blocked

Problem: Your scraper is being blocked

This wiki aims to be a beginner friendly entry point in understanding why this could happen and how to mitigate it.

Note: This document is only relevant if there are issues, if your custom shell script loop using curl runs fine that's great.

Most common issues

You're using a non-browser based scraper (curl, requests, scrapy, etc)

• The days where this was sufficient are long gone now 😄
• It's easy for a site to use JS to gather or calculate some data and require that in their backend (sent in the form of cookies/headers/post data)
• In addition most sites are built with dynamic JS nowadays, so static html scraping won't get you far
• Solution: Switch to a scraping framework which uses a real browser (puppeteer, playwright)

You're using Selenium

• Selenium is the grandfather of browser based scraping frameworks and leaks it's presence in too many ways
• This applies to anything that is not a real browser as well: Scrapy's Splash, PhantomJS, Electron, CasperJS, etc
• Solution: Don't use Selenium, use puppeteer or playwright

You're using puppeteer without stealth

• By default the usage of puppeteer (in both headless and headful mode) can be detected by a site
• Solution: Use puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth

You're using non-sensical data

• Don't try to emulate another browser engine or device type when using a desktop browser
• Don't use data that doesn't make sense (e.g. macOS platform with a Nvidia RTX 3080 GPU)

Your IP address is bad

• Don't use free proxies from the internet, they are being detected as such easily
• Don't use Tor, all exit nodes are public and the network is meant for people in need
• Don't use your home internet too often or you will run into rate-limiting or bans
• Don't use datacenter IPs or proxies, they can be detected as not being "residential"

How bot detection works

(TODO: Add more content here)