How to use proxies with Octoparse

Why Octoparse needs a proxy

Because Octoparse has nowhere to type a login, a proxy that needs one cannot be entered directly. A small local forwarder bridges the gap.

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.

• Residentialfrom $2.64 per GB
• Residential Litefrom $0.69 per GB
• Unlimited Datacenterfrom $0.24 per hour

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.

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

1. Start a local forwarder that listens without a login and passes traffic to your proxy with the login added. With gost: gost -L=:8899 -F=http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@resi.piratproxies.com:8080.
2. In Octoparse, open the task's settings and find the anti-blocking section.
3. Choose Use my own proxies, click Configure and add 127.0.0.1:8899.
4. Run the task locally.

Menu names can differ a little between versions of Octoparse. The four values to enter are always the same.

Rotating or sticky

For crawling many pages with Octoparse, 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

• A small local forwarder solves this: it listens on your computer without a login and adds the username and password on the way out. See proxies with a login in tools that only take IP and port.
• Your own proxies apply to local runs. Tasks run in Octoparse's cloud use Octoparse's proxies instead.
• 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

Octoparse 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.