F5 Bypass Proxy for Web Scraping: A Complete Guide

Yuvraj Chandra
Yuvraj Chandra
October 15, 2024 · 5 min read

F5 Networks is a collection of multi-cloud application solutions and security services known for its advanced Web Application Firewall (WAF). This WAF employs high-level techniques to detect and block automated requests, making it one of the "toughest nuts to crack" in web scraping.

In this article, you'll learn how to bypass F5 using proxies, along with strategies for rotating them to boost your chances of staying under the radar.

How to Scrape Websites Protected by F5 with Proxies

The F5 anti-scraping feature distinguishes bot behavior from human traffic by monitoring request frequency and how often a page is accessed. If you make too many requests within a short time frame, F5 will flag you as a bot and block your request. This feature is known as rate limiting.

F5 also tracks IP addresses and their activities. Monitoring how visiting IPs behave often reveals patterns that separate bots from humans. For example, the number of requests originating from a single IP can raise suspicion and result in an IP ban.

To combat this, proxies effectively conceal your original IP address, allowing you to mimic legitimate traffic and bypass these restrictions.

Using Python, here's a step-by-step guide on how to set up an F5 bypass proxy.

To get started, ensure you have the Python Requests library installed. If not, use the following command to install it.

Terminal
pip3 install requests

Python Requests allows you to specify a proxy by passing your proxy details to the proxies parameter in your request.

First, create a basic scraper that makes a standard HTTP request to the target URL.

Example
# import the required module
import requests

# make a GET request to target website
response = requests.get("https://httpbin.io/ip")

# print HTML content
print(response.text)

The code snippet above makes a GET request to https://httpbin.io/ip and prints its text content. Since we have not specified a proxy, this code will return your machine's IP address.

Output
{
  "origin": "98.01.235.546:1590"
}

Now, let's configure a proxy to hide your IP address. For this example, we've grabbed a proxy from the Free Proxy List.

Pass your proxy details as parameters in your request. For cleaner, more readable code, you can create a proxy dictionary and pass it to the proxies parameter.

Your complete code should look like this:

Example
# import the required module
import requests

# define a proxy dictionary
proxy = {
    "http": "http://66.29.154.105:3128",
    "https": "http://66.29.154.105:3128",
}

# make a GET request to target website using the specified proxy
response = requests.get("https://httpbin.io/ip", proxies=proxy)

# print HTML content
print(response.text)

If done correctly, your result will be your proxy's IP address.

Output
{
  "origin": "66.29.154.105:46844"
}

Congratulations! You've successfully set the proxies.

Frustrated that your web scrapers are blocked once and again?
ZenRows API handles rotating proxies and headless browsers for you.
Try for FREE

Rotating Proxies to Bypass F5

Keep in mind that F5 monitors IP addresses, so even your proxy's IP can eventually get flagged and blocked. To prevent this, it's important to rotate proxies between requests.

This allows you to distribute traffic across multiple IP addresses, making your requests appear to originate from unique users.

Here's a step-by-step guide on how to create an F5 bypass proxy rotator.

Start by defining a proxy pool. We've grabbed 5 unique proxies from the Free Proxy List. If these aren't working at the time of reading, you can grab some new ones.

Example
# import the required modules
import requests

# define a proxy pool
proxies = [

    { "http": "http://66.29.154.105:3128", "https": "http://66.29.154.105:3128"},
    { "http": "http://47.242.47.64:8888", "https": "http://47.242.47.64:8888"},
    { "http": "http://41.169.69.91:3128", "https": "http://41.169.69.91:3128"},
    { "http": "http://50.172.75.120:80", "https": "http://50.172.75.120:80"},
    { "http": "http://34.122.187.196:80", "https": "http://66.29.154.105:80"}

]

After that, choose a proxy at random from your proxy pool using Python's random.choice() method. You must import the random module for this to work.

Example
# ...
import random

# ...
# choose a proxy at random
proxy = random.choice(proxies)

Lastly, route your request through the selected proxy.

Example
# ...

# make your request using the selected proxy
response = requests.get("https://httpbin.io/ip", proxies=proxies)

Put all the steps together to get the complete code and add a print statement to log the response.

Example
# import the required modules
import requests
import random

# define a proxy pool
proxies = [

    { "http": "http://66.29.154.105:3128", "https": "http://66.29.154.105:3128"},
    { "http": "http://47.242.47.64:8888", "https": "http://47.242.47.64:8888"},
    { "http": "http://41.169.69.91:3128", "https": "http://41.169.69.91:3128"},
    { "http": "http://50.172.75.120:80", "https": "http://50.172.75.120:80"},
    { "http": "http://34.122.187.196:80", "https": "http://34.122.187.196:80"}

]

# choose a proxy at random
proxy = random.choice(proxies)
print(f"Using proxy: {proxy}")

# make your request using the selected proxy
response = requests.get("https://httpbin.io/ip", proxies=proxy)

# print the HTML content
print(response.text)

Run this code multiple times to verify it works. You'll get a different IP address for each request.

Here are the results for three runs.

Output
# request 1
{
  "origin": "47.242.47.64:8888"
}

# request 2
{
  "origin": "50.172.75.120:80"
}

# request 3
{
  "origin": "34.122.187.196:80"
}

Awesome! You've created your first F5 proxy rotator.

Best Proxy Providers for Bypassing F5 in 2024

Although we used free proxies to show you how to create an F5 bypass proxy, they're generally unreliable in real-world situations, as websites can easily detect and block them.

For a more effective F5 bypass proxy, you need a reliable premium proxy provider.

Here are the three best premium proxy providers, starting with the most reliable one.

ZenRows

Unlike the other tools on this list, ZenRows isn't just a proxy provider. While it offers a large pool of premium residential proxies, it also has features designed to bypass WAFs and grant you access to your desired data.

These features include automatically rotating proxies or sticking with a particular IP for a set duration, geo-targeting, anti-CAPTCHAs, JavaScript Rendering, and many more.

Below is a step-by-step guide on how to get started with ZenRows's premium proxies and make the most of its capabilities.

Setting Up ZenRows Residential Proxies

Sign up and navigate to the ZenRows Proxy Generator page. You'll find your automatically generated residential proxy URL at the top of the page.

generate residential proxies with zenrows
Click to open the image in full screen

You can customize your proxy credentials by navigating to the Credentials tab and setting a username and password.

Once you're all set up, copy the generated proxy URL and use it in your code, just as in the previous examples.

Your new code should look like this:

Example
# import the required module
import requests

# define a proxy dictionary
proxy = {
    "http": "http://<ZENROWS_PROXY_USERNAME>:<ZENROWS_PROXY_PASSWORD>@superproxy.zenrows.com:1337",
    "https": "https://<ZENROWS_PROXY_USERNAME>:<ZENROWS_PROXY_PASSWORD>@superproxy.zenrows.com:1338"
}

# make GET request to target website using the specified proxy
response = requests.get("https://httpbin.io/ip", proxies=proxy)

# print HTML content
print(response.text)

ZenRows automatically rotates proxies by default. Thus, this code returns different IPs for each request.

Here's the result for two runs.

Output
# request 1
{
  "origin": "2.60.102.197:64587"
}

# request 2
{
  "origin": "31.181.240.86:56195"
}

Well done!

Smartproxy

Another proxy provider that could get you over the hump is SmartProxy. With a pool of over 65 million IPs, this solution offers different proxy types, including data center and residential proxies, which allows you to scale as your need grows.

SmartProxy promises an average speed of less than 0.3 seconds, 99.9% uptime, and an easy-to-use system that lets you start quickly.

For more information on SmartProxy, check out its documentation.

ProxyMesh

ProxyMesh offers a flexible workflow that makes it harder for websites to track you based on IP addresses. This system consists of 17 rotating proxy servers, each with 10 IP addresses that rotate twice daily.

Currently, ProxyMesh only supports the HTTP protocol but can proxy HTTPS connections using its connect method. This makes it suitable for small-scale scraping projects.

Check out the ProxyMesh documentation for more details.

Conclusion

An F5 bypass proxy allows you to hide your IP address and operate in the background. However, in most cases, adding proxies alone might not be enough. Since F5 uses various sophisticated techniques to detect bots, you need additional configurations, such as headless browsers. More on that in this blog on how to bypass F5.

Bear in mind that some configurations can get tedious to implement manually. You can save yourself the manual work and use the ZenRows web scraping API to bypass every WAF and retrieve the necessary data.

So, try ZenRows for free today!

Ready to get started?

Up to 1,000 URLs for free are waiting for you