How to Use Proxies with MechanicalSoup

Which proxy to use

For most scraping, Residential Lite is the cheapest way to get home IP addresses in the right country. Use Residential when you need a particular state or city, and Unlimited Datacenter for targets in the United States that do not block data centre addresses.

What to enter

A PiratProxies plan gives you four things: a host, a port, a username and a password. These are the values for Residential; the username and password are on your plan page.

Host	`resi.piratproxies.com`
HTTP port	`8080`
SOCKS5 port	`1080`
Username	`USERNAME`
Password	from your plan page

As one address:

http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@resi.piratproxies.com:8080

The country and the session are chosen in the username, not in a separate setting. The generator on your plan page writes the username for you, and Targeting and sessions explains each part.

Steps

Create the browser, then set session.proxies.
Use a sticky username: a form login is several requests that must come from one IP address.

Example

Python

import mechanicalsoup

browser = mechanicalsoup.StatefulBrowser()
proxy = "http://USERNAME-country-us-time-600-session-a1b2c3d4:PASSWORD@resi.piratproxies.com:8080"
browser.session.proxies = {"http": proxy, "https": proxy}
browser.open("https://api.ipify.org")
print(browser.page.text)

Replace USERNAME and PASSWORD with the login from your plan page. The example asks an IP-check address, so the output is the address your request left from.

Rotating or sticky

For crawling many pages with MechanicalSoup, leave the username without a session so every request leaves from a new IP address. For anything with steps that belong together, such as a login, a cart or a paginated search that sets cookies, add a session to the username so those requests share one address.

A sticky username looks like this:

USERNAME-country-us-time-600-session-a1b2c3d4

If it does not work

With a rotating username, the login page and the form submit can leave from different addresses, and the site drops the session.
A 407 error means the username or password was not accepted. Copy both again from your plan page, and check that nothing added a space or cut the username short.
If the IP address is in the wrong country, look at the username: the country code is part of it. More fixes.

Questions

Which PiratProxies proxy should I use with MechanicalSoup?

MechanicalSoup is a product of its own makers. PiratProxies is not affiliated with it; the name is used here only to say what this guide is about. Use it within the rules of the sites you work with and our acceptable use policy.