UserAgentRandomizer

There exist few use cases where random HTTP User-Agent strings are required. This was the motivation for me to write this user-agent-randomizer Ruby gem. Currently it provides ca. 10.700 different HTTP User-Agent strings. You can choose a random HTTP User-Agent string from the entire pool as well as fetch a HTTP User-Agent string by category.

Every HTTP User-Agent string is assigned exactly to one of the following categories:

• crawler
• desktop_browser
• mobile_browser
• console
• offline_browser
• email_client
• link_checker
• email_collector
• validator
• feed_reader
• library
• cloud_platform
• other

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'user-agent-randomizer'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it manually:

$ gem install user-agent-randomizer

Usage

The usage is pretty simple. You can fetch a random HTTP User-Agent string from the entire pool as well as one from a specified category (see the list above):

Open an IRB and require the gem first of all:

irb> require 'user_agent_randomizer'
# => true

Fetch a random HTTP User-Agent string from the entire pool:

irb> ua_all = UserAgentRandomizer::UserAgent.fetch
# => #<UserAgentRandomizer::UserAgent:0x007fe1f30a6658 @type="crawler", @string="CatchBot/1.0;  http://www.catchbot.com">

Fetch a random HTTP User-Agent for a desktop browser:

irb> ua_desktop = UserAgentRandomizer::UserAgent.fetch(type: "desktop_browser")
# => #<UserAgentRandomizer::UserAgent:0x007fe1f2282b58 @type="desktop_browser", @string="Mozilla/4.6 [en] (WinNT; I)">

Retrieve the type and the string from the objects above:

irb> puts "UA general -> type: '#{ua_all.type}', string: '#{ua_all.string}'"
# => "UA general -> type: 'crawler', string: 'CatchBot/1.0;  http://www.catchbot.com'"

irb> puts "UA desktop browser -> type: '#{ua_desktop.type}', string: '#{ua_desktop.string}'"
# => "UA desktop browser -> type: 'desktop_browser', string: 'Mozilla/4.6 [en] (WinNT; I)'"

Contributing

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/asconix/user-agent-randomizer/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

Copyright © 2014 Asconix Systems AS (Christoph Pilka), released under the MIT license