What is Golang?
Golang, also known as Go, is an open-source static type, compiled programming language designed for efficiency and simplicity. Created by tech giant Google, Golang facilitates the development of software that’s simple, reliable, and efficient.
Go effectively combines the best of both statically and dynamically typed languages, thereby making it increasingly popular among developers. Its robust standard library helps ease handling of tasks like string manipulation, web scraping, and networking.
In the context of web scraping, Golang shines with its lightning-fast frameworks, such as Colly, which is used for creating web scrapers. With Colly, you can effortlessly extract structured data from websites, making it ideal for data mining, data processing, archiving, or site application testing.
One of the main advantages of using Golang for web scraping is its speed. It is reported to perform the same tasks significantly faster than even some of the most optimized modern frameworks for Python.
Colly, with Golang’s core, provides a clean API, fantastic speed, automatic handling of cookies and sessions, caching, robots.txt support, and even distributed scraping. Coupled together, Golang and Colly offer a powerful tool for web scraping tasks.
Proxy authentication in Golang is straightforward, especially with Colly. Golang’s default http client can be customized for numerous HTTP options, and the round-robin proxy switcher simplifies setting proxy authentication, allowing you to extract web data securely and swiftly.
Thus, whether for web scraping, proxy authentication, or application development, Golang is an excellent language to consider for efficient and quick results.
Why use Gloang for Web Scraping?
Golang provides one of the fastest frameworks for scraping web content.
Go offers a wide selection of frameworks. Some are simple packages with core functionality, while others, such as Ferret, Gocrawl, Soup, and Hakrawler, offer a advanced web scraping architecture to simplify data extraction.
The most popular framework for writing web scrapers in Go is Colly.
With Colly you can easily extract structured data from websites, which can be used for a wide range of applications, like data mining, data processing, web site application testing or archiving.
Colly Features:
- Clean API
- Fast (>1k request/sec on a single core)
- Manages request delays and maximum concurrency per domain
- Automatic cookie and session handling
- Sync/async/parallel scraping
- Distributed scraping
- Caching
- Automatic encoding of non-unicode responses
- Robots.txt support
- Google App Engine support
Colly has a clean API, handles cookies and sessions automatically, supports caching and robots.txt, and most importantly, it’s fast. Colly offers distributed scraping, HTTP request delays, and concurrency per domain.
Setting Up Proxy Authentication for Golang Colly
HTTP configuration
Colly uses Golang’s default http client as networking layer. HTTP options can be tweaked by changing the default HTTP roundtripper.
c := colly.NewCollector()
c.WithTransport(&http.Transport{
Proxy: http.ProxyFromEnvironment,
DialContext: (&net.Dialer{
Timeout: 30 * time.Second,
KeepAlive: 30 * time.Second,
DualStack: true,
}).DialContext,
MaxIdleConns: 100,
IdleConnTimeout: 90 * time.Second,
TLSHandshakeTimeout: 10 * time.Second,
ExpectContinueTimeout: 1 * time.Second,
}Setting proxy authentication code example:
roundRobinSwitcher, err := collyProxy.RoundRobinProxySwitcher("socks5://username:[email protected]:9000")
And the HTTP package will add auth header for you automatically:
(https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/src/net/http/transport.go#L1624)
case cm.proxyURL.Scheme == "socks5":
conn := pconn.conn
d := socksNewDialer("tcp", conn.RemoteAddr().String())
if u := cm.proxyURL.User; u != nil {
auth := &socksUsernamePassword{
Username: u.Username(),
}
auth.Password, _ = u.Password()
d.AuthMethods = []socksAuthMethod{
socksAuthMethodNotRequired,
socksAuthMethodUsernamePassword,
}
d.Authenticate = auth.Authenticate
}
if _, err := d.DialWithConn(ctx, conn, "tcp", cm.targetAddr); err != nil {
conn.Close()
return nil, err
}This method can be used if you want to force your user to specify their proxy server address and port number, and type their username and password into your application, and your application to store it somewhere (either in the clear or using necessarily reversible encryption)
TL;DR
Golang, often known as Go, is an open-source static type programming language renowned for its efficiency and simplicity. Its function is wide, extending to software development, web scraping, and proxy authentication. Golang delivers unparalleled speed with its lightning-fast frameworks such as Colly, making it ideal for tasks involving data extraction, data mining, data processing, or site testing.
Colly’s main features include an intuitive API, rapid speed, automatic cookie and session handling, caching, robots.txt support and distributed scraping. The round-robin proxy switcher simplifies proxy authentication on Golang, providing secured and swift web data extraction. This piece further discusses the advantages of using Golang for web scraping, the features of the Colly framework, setting up proxy authentication, and HTTP configuration.
Golang’s standard library simplifies tasks like networking and string manipulation, while it’s default HTTP client can be customized for numerous options. Hence, Golang, paired with Colly or other frameworks, offers a potent tool for various web-related tasks.
