How to Setup Proxies on Puppeteer
Puppeteer just like every other tool of its kind has support for proxies. For Puppeteer, setting proxies is quite easy provided you know what you are doing. All you need to do is add it as an argument to the launch method. Below is a small script that demonstrates how to make use of proxies with Puppeteer.
'use strict';
const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
(async() => {
const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
args: [ '--proxy-server=http://10.10.10.10:8000' ]
});
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('http://toscrape.com');
await browser.close();
})();
As you can see from the above, it only takes a few steps to set up proxies for Puppeteer. The proxy used above is a single proxy and does not require a username and password authentication. If you need to rotate IPs and you need to use the username and password authentication, then the syntax would change.
What is Puppeteer?
Puppeteer is a NodeJS library that provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. You can liken it to Selenium only that it automates only Chrome and is meant only for NodeJS developers.
With Puppeteer, you can develop automation tools that would carry out repetitive workflows online — what you do with that power is up to you. Some use it for developing web scrapers, others for submitting forms, SEO, and a lot more. Puppeteer is quite easy to use and makes the development of web automation tools easy for NodeJS developers.
- Get best proxies for ZennoPoster
Is the Use of Proxies Illegal?
The legality of things is determined by the law in your region. However, we do that for most regions of the world, proxies are considered legal except you try using them for illegal tasks. However, there are a few countries that make the use of proxies illegal especially when you use the non-government-approved ones.
For this reason, it is important to speak to a competent legal professional in your region on the legality of proxies to avoid getting into trouble with the law. Unfortunately, even though they are legal in most regions, most websites do not allow their usage — this is the reason we emphasize using undetectable proxies.
Rotating Vs. Dedicated Proxies - Which are the Best for Puppeteer?
The best proxies for Puppeteer depend on the project requirement and target site. There are some projects such as web scraping projects that require you to send too many requests within a short period of time and as such, require rotating proxies to avoid getting blocked.
On the other hand, there are some projects that require you to maintain sessions for a while and as such, you are also required to maintain the same IP. For these types of projects, dedicated proxies are required as changing IP too quickly is suspicious to most projects especially when you are logged in.