How to Use Proxies with AIOHTTP: The Ultimate Guide

If you‘re looking to perform web scraping, automate online tasks, or access geo-restricted content with Python, there‘s a good chance you‘ve heard of aiohttp. This popular asynchronous HTTP client/server framework makes it easy to execute multiple concurrent requests efficiently.

However, when making many requests from the same IP address, you may quickly run into issues like IP bans, CAPTCHAs, or other anti-bot measures employed by websites. That‘s where proxies come in. By routing your aiohttp requests through an intermediary proxy server, you can hide your real IP address and avoid these common roadblocks.

In this in-depth guide, we‘ll walk you through everything you need to know about using proxies with aiohttp, including:

• Why you should use a proxy with aiohttp
• Step-by-step instructions for setting HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS proxies
• Dealing with proxy authentication and SSL errors
• Implementing IP rotation to avoid bans
• Integrating aiohttp with premium Bright Data proxies for maximum reliability

By the end of this article, you‘ll be an expert at anonymizing your aiohttp requests with proxies. Let‘s dive in!

Why Use a Proxy with AIOHTTP?

There are many good reasons to combine proxies with your aiohttp requests:

1. Hide your IP address and location for anonymity
2. Circumvent IP-based rate limits and bans
3. Access geo-blocked content by using IPs from different countries
4. Reduce the chance of your scraper getting blocked or blacklisted
5. Improve success rates of requests to strict sites
6. Make your bot traffic appear to come from real users in different locations

Without a proxy, all your aiohttp requests will originate from the same IP address – your server‘s IP. This makes it easy for sites to detect that it‘s a bot and block your access if you‘re making many requests.

But by using a proxy, your requests will instead come from the IP of the proxy server. The destination site will see the proxy‘s IP, not yours. If you have access to many proxy servers, you can spread requests across different IPs to avoid abuse detection systems.

How to Set a Proxy in AIOHTTP

Now that you understand the benefits, let‘s look at how to actually use proxies with aiohttp. We‘ll cover the three main types – HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS.

Setting an HTTP Proxy

The easiest way to use a proxy with aiohttp is via the proxy parameter when initializing the session or making a request. Here‘s an example:

import aiohttp
import asyncio

async def main():
    async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
        async with session.get(‘http://example.com‘, proxy=‘http://proxy.com:8000‘) as response:
            print(await response.text())

asyncio.run(main())

In this code, we set the proxy to http://proxy.com:8000 which is the full URL of the HTTP proxy server. The format is:

protocol://user:[email protected]:port

Where:

• protocol is either http or https
• user and password are optional if authentication is required
• host is the hostname or IP address of the proxy server
• port is the port number the proxy is running on

So in the example above, it‘s an HTTP proxy with no authentication, running on proxy.com and port 8000.

When you set the proxy like this, aiohttp will route the request through the specified proxy server instead of sending it directly to the destination.

Setting an HTTPS Proxy

Using an HTTPS proxy is very similar to HTTP, you just need to set the protocol to https in the proxy URL:

proxy=‘https://user:[email protected]:8000‘

However, there are some caveats. Prior to Python 3.10, TLS in TLS tunneling was disabled by default for security reasons. So if you‘re using an older Python version, HTTPS proxies may not work out of the box.

Starting in Python 3.10, this tunnelling was re-enabled when using asyncio transports. And in aiohttp v3.8+, full HTTPS proxy support was restored. So to reliably use HTTPS proxies, make sure you‘re on Python 3.10+ and aiohttp v3.8+.

Setting a SOCKS Proxy

SOCKS proxies are a bit different than HTTP/HTTPS and not natively supported by aiohttp. To use a SOCKS proxy, you first need to install the aiohttp-socks library:

pip install aiohttp-socks

This extends aiohttp with SOCKS capabilities. Here‘s how to use it:

from aiohttp_socks import ProxyConnector

connector = ProxyConnector.from_url(‘socks5://user:[email protected]:1080‘)

async with aiohttp.ClientSession(connector=connector) as session:
    ...

The key parts here are:

1. Create a ProxyConnector using the from_url method and pass in the SOCKS proxy URL
2. Pass this connector to aiohttp.ClientSession

The SOCKS URL format is the same as before, just with socks4 or socks5 as the protocol instead of http/https.

Under the hood, aiohttp-socks uses the python-socks library to implement the SOCKS protocol and channel aiohttp requests through the SOCKS proxy.

Seeing it in Action

Let‘s do a complete example to verify the proxy is actually being used. We‘ll request http://lumtest.com/myip.json which returns the IP address it sees the request coming from.

If the proxy is working, this will be the proxy‘s IP, not our real IP. Here‘s the code:

import aiohttp
import asyncio

async def main():
    proxy = ‘http://user:[email protected]:8000‘
    async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
        async with session.get(‘http://lumtest.com/myip.json‘, proxy=proxy) as response:
            data = await response.json()
            print(data)

asyncio.run(main())

And the output:

{"ip":"104.237.255.38","country":"Ukraine","asn":29550}

This shows the request came from IP 104.237.255.38 which is the proxy server, not our real IP. The proxy integration is working perfectly!

Advanced Proxy Techniques

Now that you have the basics down, let‘s look at some more advanced proxy usage techniques.

Setting a Global Proxy

If you want all your aiohttp requests to go through a proxy by default, you can set it globally via environment variables. Aiohttp reads the HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY variables to determine the default proxy URL.

So before running your script, you can set them like:

export HTTP_PROXY="http://proxy.com:8000" 
export HTTPS_PROXY="https://proxy.com:8443"

Then in your code, set trust_env=True when creating the aiohttp session:

async with aiohttp.ClientSession(trust_env=True) as session:
    ...

Now any request you make will automatically go through the proxy specified in the env vars.

Proxy Authentication

Many proxies require authentication to connect. With aiohttp, there are two ways to provide proxy credentials:

1. Include them in the proxy URL:

proxy="http://user:[email protected]:8000"

2. Use aiohttp.BasicAuth and the proxy_auth parameter:

proxy_auth = aiohttp.BasicAuth("user", "password")

async with session.get("http://example.com", proxy="http://proxy.com:8000", proxy_auth=proxy_auth) as response:
    ...

Both methods achieve the same result. If the credentials are incorrect, you‘ll likely get a 407 Proxy Authentication Required error.

Ignoring SSL Errors

Sometimes proxies can cause SSL verification errors due to certificate issues. To ignore these errors, set ssl=False when making the request:

async with session.get("http://example.com", proxy="http://proxy.com:8000", ssl=False) as response:
    ...  

This disables SSL verification for that request. However, use caution as this makes you vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.

Proxy Rotation

To really scale web scraping without getting blocked, you need multiple proxies and the ability to rotate which IP is used for each request.

The most basic way to achieve this is to maintain your own pool of proxy servers and randomly select one for each request:

import random

proxies = [
    "http://proxy-1.com:8000",
    "socks5://proxy-2.com:1080", 
    "http://user:[email protected]:8888"
]

async def fetch(url):
    proxy = random.choice(proxies)
    async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
        async with session.get(url, proxy=proxy) as response:
            return await response.text()

This works but has some downsides:

• You have to source and maintain the list of proxies yourself
• Free proxies are often unreliable with poor performance
• Paid proxy plans can get expensive, especially for large pools

Fortunately, there‘s a better solution! Using a premium proxy service like Bright Data.

Using Bright Data Proxies with AIOHTTP

Bright Data offers an extensive network of over 72 million residential IPs, as well as ISP, mobile and datacenter proxies. Their proxies are highly anonymous, secure, and ethically sourced. You get access to a huge pool of quality proxies without having to manage them yourself.

Here are a few of the key benefits of Bright Data proxies:

• Largest proxy IP pool on the market with over 72M residential IPs
• Proxies in every country, city and mobile carrier for unlimited geo-targeting
• Fully anonymous for making your bot traffic look like real users
• 99.99% network uptime and expert 24/7 customer support
• User friendly dashboard and API for managing all your proxies
• Pay-as-you-go pricing with plans for any use case or budget
• Automatic proxy rotation built-in for maximum success rates

Integrating Bright Data proxies into aiohttp only takes a few minutes. Here‘s how to get started:

1. Sign up for a free Bright Data account at https://brightdata.com/signup
2. In the dashboard, click "Proxies" and then "Residential Proxies"
3. Choose your preferred country, ASN, and amount then click "Create"
4. On the following page, find your proxy hostname, port, username and password

Now construct the full proxy URL by combining your username, password, and host like:

http://username:[email protected]:port

For example:

http://user-dcs33d:[email protected]:33033

Then use this URL in aiohttp like any other proxy:

import aiohttp
import asyncio

async def main():
    proxy_url = "http://user-dcs33d:[email protected]:33033"
    async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
        async with session.get("http://example.com", proxy=proxy_url) as response:
            print(await response.text())

asyncio.run(main())

That‘s it! Your request will now be routed through Bright Data‘s extensive proxy network. Each request will use a different IP, automatically rotated by Bright Data to provide the highest level of anonymity and success rates.

Bright Data also offers a proxy manager for automatically assigning a subnet of IPs to your requests, but that‘s beyond the scope of this aiohttp tutorial. Check out their documentation to learn more.

Conclusion

You should now have a solid understanding of how to use proxies with aiohttp for anonymous and successful web scraping. To recap, we covered:

• The benefits of using a proxy to mask your IP and avoid anti-bot countermeasures
• How to set HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS proxies using aiohttp‘s proxy and connector parameters
• Advanced techniques like proxy authentication, ignoring SSL errors, and basic proxy rotation
• Why residential proxies from a premium service like Bright Data offer the best performance and ethics

So what are you waiting for? Sign up for some reliable proxies and start anonymizing your aiohttp requests today! With the power of proxies on your side, no data source will be out of reach. Happy scraping!