fake-useragent

Up-to-date simple useragent faker with real world database

Features

• Data is pre-downloaded from useragentstring.com and part of the package
• Retrieves user-agent strings locally
• Supports Python 3.x
• Fallback to external resource (useragentstring.com) + caching

Installation

pip install fake-useragent

Or if you have multiple Python / pip versions installed, use pip3:

pip3 install fake-useragent

Usage

from fake_useragent import UserAgent
ua = UserAgent()

ua.ie
# Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 9.0; en-US);
ua.msie
# Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_3; Trident/6.0)'
ua['Internet Explorer']
# Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; GTB7.4; InfoPath.2; SV1; .NET CLR 3.3.69573; WOW64; en-US)
ua.opera
# Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; ru) Presto/2.8.131 Version/11.11
ua.chrome
# Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1216.0 Safari/537.2'
ua.google
# Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_4) AppleWebKit/537.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1290.1 Safari/537.13
ua['google chrome']
# Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS i686 2268.111.0) AppleWebKit/536.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/20.0.1132.57 Safari/536.11
ua.firefox
# Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64; rv:16.0.1) Gecko/20121011 Firefox/16.0.1
ua.ff
# Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0.1
ua.safari
# Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5355d Safari/8536.25

# and the best one, get a random browser user-agent string
ua.random

Notes

If you want to specify your own browser list, you can do that via the browsers argument (default is: ["chrome", "edge", "internet explorer", "firefox", "safari", "opera"]).

from fake_useragent import UserAgent
ua = UserAgent(browsers=['edge', 'chrome'])
ua.random

You can add your own fallback string using the fallback parameter, in rare cases everything else failed:

import fake_useragent

ua = fake_useragent.UserAgent(fallback='your favorite Browser')
# in case if something went wrong, one more time it is REALLY!!! rare case
ua.random == 'your favorite Browser'

If you will try to get unknown browser:

from fake_useragent import UserAgent
ua = UserAgent()
ua.unknown
# Traceback (most recent call last):
#   ...
# fake_useragent.errors.FakeUserAgentError: Error occurred during getting browser: unknown

By default fake-useragent will use it's local (browsers.json) data file as the data source.

If you don't want to use the local data, but use the external data source to retrieve the user-agents. Set use_external_data to True:

from fake_useragent import UserAgent
ua = UserAgent(use_external_data=True)

As a fallback method fake-useragent will retrieve it's data from an external data source and stores in a cache file or when you expcility set use_external_data=True as parameter. You can trigger an update to the cache file by calling update():

from fake_useragent import UserAgent
ua = UserAgent()
ua.update()

The default location of the external resource cache file is in your os temp dir, like /tmp.
You can change the temp directory by changing cache_path (mainly useful together when use_external_data is set to True).

import fake_useragent

# I am strongly! recommend using a version suffix
location = '/home/user/fake_useragent%s.json' % fake_useragent.VERSION

ua = fake_useragent.UserAgent(use_external_data=True, cache_path=location)
ua.random

If you need to safe some attributes from overriding them in UserAgent by __getattr__ method use safe_attrs you can pass there attributes names. At least this will prevent you from raising FakeUserAgentError when attribute not found.

For example, when using fakeuseragent with injections <https://github.com/tailhook/injections> you need to:

import fake_useragent

ua = fake_useragent.UserAgent(safe_attrs=('__injections__',))

Please, do not use if you don't understand why you need this. This is magic for rarely extreme case.

Experiencing issues?

Make sure that you using latest version!

pip install --upgrade fake-useragent

Check version via python console:

import fake_useragent

print(fake_useragent.VERSION)

And you are always welcome to post issues.

Please do not forget to mention the version that you are using.

Developers

Since GitHub Actions is unable to reach useragentstring.com. We can run the script below to automatically scrape the user-agent strings from the external data source. The script will copy the JSONlines file to the src/fake_useragent/data directory. Execute:

./update_data_file.sh

The data JSON file is part of the Python package, see pyproject.toml. Read more about Data files support.

Tests

pip install -r requirements.txt
tox

Changelog

• 1.0.0 November 17, 2022

  • Make the JSON Lines data file part of the Python package, data is retrieved locally
    • Extend the myproject.toml file with package-data support
  • Remove centralized caching server implementation
  • Make real unit-tests which should run reliable, fast, independent and without Internet connection

• 0.1.14 November 5, 2022

  • Improve code quality standards using modern Python >=3.7 syntax
  • Migrated to pyproject.toml build system format + syntax check
  • Add additional classifiers to the toml file
  • Improved tox.ini file
  • Improved GitHub Actions job using pip cache
  • And various small fixes

• 0.1.13 October 21, 2022

  • Implement browsers argument, allowing you to override the browser names you want to use
  • Fix browser listing of Internet Explorer and Edge
  • Don't depend on w3schools.com anymore
  • Clean-up data (temp) file format
  • Update fallback cache server URL / use JSON Lines as file format
  • Move to GitHub Actions instead of Travis
  • Using black Python formatter in favour of Flake

• 0.1.12 March 31, 2022

  • forked

• 0.1.11 October 4, 2018

  • moved s3 + cloudfront fallback to heroku.com, cuz someone from Florida did ~25M requests last month

• 0.1.10 February 11, 2018

  • Minor fix docs cloudfront url

• 0.1.9 February 11, 2018

  • fix w3schools.com renamed IE/Edge to Edge/IE
  • moved heroku.com fallback to s3 + cloudfront
  • stop testing Python3.3 and pypy

• 0.1.8 November 2, 2017

  • fix useragentstring.com Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket

• 0.1.7 April 2, 2017

  • fix broken README.rst

• 0.1.6 April 2, 2017

  • fixes bug use_cache_server do not affected anything
  • w3schools.com <https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp>_ moved to https
  • verify_ssl options added, by default it is True (urllib.urlopen ssl context for Python 2.7.9- and 3.4.3- is not supported)

• 0.1.5 February 28, 2017

  • added ua.edge alias to Internet Explorer
  • w3schools.com starts displaying Edge statistic
  • Python 2.6 is not tested anymore
  • use_cache_server option added
  • Increased fake_useragent.settings.HTTP_TIMEOUT to 5 seconds

• 0.1.4 December 14, 2016

  • Added custom data file location support
  • Added fallback browser support, in case of unavailable data sources
  • Added alias fake_useragent.FakeUserAgent for fake_useragent.UserAgent
  • Added alias fake_useragent.UserAgentError for fake_useragent.FakeUserAgentError
  • Reduced fake_useragent.settings.HTTP_TIMEOUT to 3 seconds
  • Started migration to new data file format
  • Simplified a lot 4+ years out of date code
  • Better thread/greenlet safety
  • Added verbose logging
  • Added safe_attrs for prevent overriding by __getattr__

• 0.1.3 November 24, 2016

  • Added hosted data file, when remote services is unavailable
  • Raises fake_useragent.errors.FakeUserAgentError in case when there is not way to download data
  • Raises fake_useragent.errors.FakeUserAgentError instead of None in case of unknown browser
  • Added gevent.sleep support in gevent patched environment when trying to download data

• X.X.X xxxxxxx xx, xxxx

  • xxxxx ?????

Authors

You can visit authors page.