How to rotate proxies in Python?

In this article we will explain how to rotate proxies for web scraping. Rotating proxies will ensure stable sessions so you can reach your desired targets without issues.

How to start with rotating proxies in Python - installing prerequisites

To get started, you can create a virtual environment by running the following command:

virtualenv venv

This command will help you to install Python, pip, and common libraries in your venv folder.
Use the source command to activate your environment:

source venv/bin/activate

Install requests module in the current virtual environment you are using:

pip install requests

Congratulations! You have finished all the steps for  the installation of the requests module!

Sending GET requests through a proxy

Now, let’s start with the basics. In some cases you might need to connect and use one single IP address or proxy. How do we use a single proxy?These are the essential things that you will need:

• Scheme (e.g., http);
• Endpoint;
• Port (e.g., 10000);
• Username and password to connect to the proxy.

Here is an example how the proxy request should look in this case:

https://Customer-username:[email protected]:10001

You can also select multiple protocols, as well as specify domains where you would like to use a separate proxy.
Replace PROXY1, PROXY2, PROXY3 with your proxy format as shown in the example below:

proxies = {
    'http': 'PROXY1',
    'https': 'PROXY2'
}

Make a request using requests.get while providing the variables we created previously:

try:
    response = requests.get('https://ip.goproxies.com', proxies=proxies, timeout=10)
    print(response.text)
except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
    print(f"An error occurred: {e}")

Your full command should look like this:

import requests

proxies = {
    'http': 'http://customer-username:[email protected]:10000',
    'https': 'https://customer-username:[email protected]:10001'
}

try:
    response = requests.get('https://ip.goproxies.com', proxies=proxies, timeout=10)
    print(response.text)
except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
    print(f"An error occurred: {e}")

The result of this script will provide you with the IP address of your proxy:

% python proxy.py 
45.42.JKL.MNO

You have now taken care of hiding behind a proxy when making requests through the Python script.
Let's learn how to rotate through a list of proxies instead of just using one.

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Rotating proxies using proxy pool

You will work with a list of proxy servers saved as a CSV file called proxies.csv, in which you need to list proxy servers as shown below:

http://customer-username:[email protected]:10000
https://customer-username:[email protected]:10001
http://customer-username:[email protected]:10000
http://customer-username:[email protected]:10000
http://customer-username:[email protected]:10000

If you want to add more proxies in the file, add each of them in a separate line.
After that, create a Python file and specify the file name and the timeout duration for each single proxy response.

TIMEOUT_IN_SECONDS = 10
CSV_FILENAME = 'proxies.csv'

Using the code provided, open the CSV file, read each line of proxy servers into the csv_row variable, and build the scheme_proxy_map configuration.
This is an example of how it should look:

with open(CSV_FILENAME) as open_file:
    reader = csv.reader(open_file)
    for csv_row in reader:
        scheme_proxy_map = {
            'https': csv_row[0],
        }

To ensure that everything runs efficiently, we'll use the same scraping code as before, to access the site with proxies.

with open(CSV_FILENAME) as open_file:
    reader = csv.reader(open_file)
    for csv_row in reader:
        proxies = {
            'https': csv_row[0],
        }

        try:
            response = requests.get('https://ip.goproxies.com', proxies=proxies, timeout=TIMEOUT_IN_SECONDS)
            print(response.text)
        except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
            print(f"An error occurred with proxy {csv_row[0]}: {e}")

If you want to scrape content using any working proxy from the list and stop the script after a successful attempt, just add a break after print line to stop going through the proxies in the CSV file:

response = requests.get('https://ip.goproxies.com', 
proxies=proxies, timeout=TIMEOUT_IN_SECONDS)
        print(response.text)
        break  # break here to stop going through the proxies

Your full code should look like this:

import requests
import csv

TIMEOUT_IN_SECONDS = 10
CSV_FILENAME = 'proxies.csv'

with open(CSV_FILENAME) as open_file:
    reader = csv.reader(open_file)
    for csv_row in reader:
        proxies = {
            'https': csv_row[0],
        }

        try:
            response = requests.get('https://ip.goproxies.com', proxies=proxies, timeout=TIMEOUT_IN_SECONDS)
            print(response.text)
            break  # Break the loop after a successful request
        except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
            print(f"An error occurred with proxy {csv_row[0]}: {e}")

That's it! Congratulations, you have successfully learned how to rotate proxies using Python.