crawler user agents

Syntactic patterns of HTTP user-agents used by bots / robots / crawlers / scrapers / spiders. pull-request welcome :star:

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Python

crawler-user-agents

This repository contains a list of of HTTP user-agents used by robots, crawlers, and spiders as in single JSON file.

Install

Direct download

Download the crawler-user-agents.json file from this repository directly.

Npm / Yarn

crawler-user-agents is deployed on npmjs.com: https://www.npmjs.com/package/crawler-user-agents

To use it using npm or yarn:

npm install --save crawler-user-agents
# OR
yarn add crawler-user-agents

In Node.js, you can require the package to get an array of crawler user agents.

const crawlers = require('crawler-user-agents');
console.log(crawlers);

Usage

Each pattern is a regular expression. It should work out-of-the-box wih your favorite regex library:

  • JavaScript: if (RegExp(entry.pattern).test(req.headers['user-agent']) { ... }
  • PHP: add a slash before and after the pattern: if (preg_match('/'.$entry['pattern'].'/', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])): ...
  • Python: if re.search(entry['pattern'], ua): ...

Contributing

I do welcome additions contributed as pull requests.

The pull requests should:

  • contain a single addition
  • specify a discriminant relevant syntactic fragment (for example “totobot” and not “Mozilla/5 totobot v20131212.alpha1”)
  • contain the pattern (generic regular expression), the discovery date (year/month/day) and the official url of the robot
  • result in a valid JSON file (don’t forget the comma between items)

Example:

{
  "pattern": "rogerbot",
  "addition_date": "2014/02/28",
  "url": "http://moz.com/help/pro/what-is-rogerbot-",
  "instances" : ["rogerbot/2.3 example UA"]
}

License

The list is under a MIT License. The versions prior to Nov 7, 2016 were under a CC-SA license.

Related work

There are a few wrapper libraries that use this data to detect bots:

Other systems for spotting robots, crawlers, and spiders that you may want to consider are: