How to scrape https website with proxies

Hi all,

My last post about scraping with proxies is quite old and I decided to write a newer version of it. In particular, today I will emphasize how to scrape https website with proxies.

There are also good news about requests library. Requests has not been supporting socks proxies for quite a long time, but in 2016 there was a new release of it. So now requests fully supports both http and socks proxies.

So let's get started. Below I will show you 4 different examples of how to scrape a single https page. First, we will scrape it with requests using socks and http proxies. Second, we will do the same using urllib3 library.

How to build uwsgi from source and run as a service

As you might have already noticed, I always deploy python applications using uwsgi and nginx. But I didn't write yet how to install uwsgi. Probably there is some version in repository, but I don't really care about it. I know it's old and not what I actually need.

I need to build uwsgi with plugin support, which would allow me to work both with python 3 and 2. Then I will create service config file, so that you can use it as service. Sounds good, isn't it? Let's do it then.

1. Download uwsgi and extract it

cd ~
curl -O http://projects.unbit.it/downloads/uwsgi-2.0.12.tar.gz
tar -xvzf uwsgi-2.0.12.tar.gz

Why Python is not good for multi-threading?

Recently I was asked this question during screening interview at Yandex (Russian search engine), and they screened fairly well from me. They said: you're cool guy, but try again after a year. You're ok for junior, but not for senior position.

Long time ago I read on some blog that multi-threading is not good idea for Python. That's the only thing came to my mind at the interview. So I only answered that's not good idea, because it will require a lot of memory. Quite silly answer.

Then the interviewer said that it's somehow related to GIL. What's GIL??? It sounded like some kind of familiar and intelligent word to me.

After that, I googled this blog which explained me why Python is not good for multi-threading. Shortly speaking, all problems come from that GIL - Global Interpreter Lock. As result Python can only execute one thread at a time. If you'd like to start many threads, all of them will be competing for a single lock (GIL). Just remember that. You can't execute multiple threads simultaneously in Python. That's one of Python disadvantages and one of popular question at interviews.

How to deploy Trac on Debian Jessie with uwsgi and nginx

Dear all,

Today I'm going to deploy one popular bug tracking tool, which is known as Trac. At first look you may ask: why is it looking so weird? Was it designed in early 90's? Well, yes, interface is very minimalistic. But on the other side it has own benefits - it's absolutely free, written in Python and open source.

Below we will deploy Trac on Debian Jessie with Postgresql, uwsgi and nginx.

As everywhere else, I'm going to stick to my scheme, which I find convenient. If you have any suggestions what can be done better, feel free to tell me in comments or by email.

Also I'm assuming that you know how to install uwsgi and nginx packages. I will only show their trac configuration files. But if you need more info, read how to build uwsgi from source.

Migration from MySQL to Postgresql with Django is easy as 1-2-3

Hi guys,

Short story: I started learning Django few years ago and created my first django website using mysql database. Over time I realized how much more powerful Postgresql is. And yesterday I decided to migrate my website from mysql to posgresql. But the main question - how?

First google search gave me suggestion - dump mysql database, then convert it to posgresql compatible format using some scripts. Check this page if you're interested.

I started doing it, but there were always some errors, even after conversion. For example, this:

ERROR:  column "blabla" is of type boolean but expression is of type integer

Launching Ionic app from external link, url capturing and redirect

Howdy guys,

I'm continuing my ionic series. Today let's talk about the following scenario:

Scenario: You have two web-apps: one for desktops and another (ionic) for mobiles. Both of them can send email notifications with some link, for example to verify email. Desktop and ionic urls are slightly different, but convertable from one to another. You always receive a desktop version of link to your email.

Task: When user clicks on that link from android device, we need to be able to open it in ionic app. In addition to that, ionic app should be able to parse that link and redirect to proper view.

ionic - auto install plugins on platform build

Hi there,

Today I will start my short series of posts about ionic, mobile framework for Android and iOS. Don't ask me how is it related to Python. I just needed to do some work for mobile.

One common task, that you need to do with ionic is to build your platform and install plugins. Let's choose Android as our platform.

To build android platform and install plugins you need to run commands like this:

cordova plugin add someplugin1
cordova plugin add someplugin2
ionic build android