merlielmag/crawler_detect

Ruby gem to detect bots and crawlers via the user agent

CrawlerDetect

About

CrawlerDetect is a Ruby version of PHP class @CrawlerDetect.

It helps to detect bots/crawlers/spiders via the user agent and other HTTP-headers. Currently able to detect 1,000's of bots/spiders/crawlers.

Why CrawlerDetect?

Comparing with other popular bot-detection gems:

	CrawlerDetect	Voight-Kampff	Browser
Number of bot-patterns	>1000	~280	~280
Number of checked HTTP-headers	10	1	1
Number of updates of bot-list (1st half of 2018)	14	1	7

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'crawler_detect'

Basic Usage

CrawlerDetect.is_crawler?("Bot user agent")
=> true

Or if you need crawler name:

detector = CrawlerDetect.new("Googlebot/2.1 (http://www.google.com/bot.html)")
detector.is_crawler?
=> true
detector.crawler_name
=> "Googlebot"

Rack::Request extension

Optionally you can add additional methods for request:

request.is_crawler?
=> false
request.crawler_name
=> nil

It's more flexible to use request.is_crawler? rather than CrawlerDetect.is_crawler? because it automatically checks 10 HTTP-headers, not only HTTP_USER_AGENT.

Only one thing you have to do is to configure Rack::CrawlerDetect midleware:

Rails

class Application < Rails::Application
  ...
  config.middleware.use Rack::CrawlerDetect
end

Rake

use Rack::CrawlerDetect

License

MIT License