Proxy Troubleshooting Checklist
A triage guide for the common proxy failures: authentication errors, 403s from origin versus proxy, CONNECT timeouts, TLS mismatches and country mismatches.
by LightningBytes Team
23 articles, page 1 of 2
Building an Amazon Price Tracker in Python
A step-by-step build: scheduled fetch, price and availability parsing, history storage and change alerts, with per-marketplace proxy configuration.
by LightningBytes Team
Running Scrapers and Proxies in Docker
Containerising a scraper: handling headless Chrome, passing proxy credentials safely, image size, and the shared-memory problem that crashes browsers.
by LightningBytes Team
Scheduling Scrapers with CI
Running collection jobs on a CI scheduler: secrets handling, artifact storage, failure alerts, and why runner egress IPs make proxies necessary.
by LightningBytes Team
Using Proxies with No-Code Automations
Where Zapier-style platforms allow proxy configuration, the limits of their HTTP steps, and the self-hosted relay pattern that works around them.
by LightningBytes Team
Getting Scraped Data into Excel
Export paths from a scraper to a spreadsheet: CSV pitfalls, direct XLSX generation, Power Query refreshes, and the data types that break on import.
by LightningBytes Team
Using ChatGPT to Build Scrapers
Practical prompts for generating and repairing parsers, plus the caveats: selectors go stale, generated code needs review, and extracted data needs checks.
by LightningBytes Team
Fixing 503 Service Unavailable
Tell a genuine outage from a soft block, honour Retry-After, and design backoff that recovers instead of escalating a rate limit into a ban.
by LightningBytes Team
The 499 Status Code Explained
499 is non-standard and means the client closed the connection before the server responded. How to tell an aggressive timeout from server throttling.
by LightningBytes Team
HTTP 409 Conflict: Causes and Fixes
Where 409 appears in scraping and APIs, what it means for a session, and how idempotency and retry design prevent it from corrupting your data.
by LightningBytes Team
Fixing 405 Method Not Allowed
A 405 means the route exists but rejects your HTTP verb. Here is how to find the verb it wants, and why proxies and WAFs can rewrite methods.
by LightningBytes Team
Fixing 403 Forbidden Errors When Scraping
A triage guide for 403s: telling a proxy rejection from a target block, then working through headers, cookies, fingerprints and IP reputation in order.
by LightningBytes Team
Parsing HTML and JSON Reliably
Writing selectors that survive redesigns, validating output with a schema, and defensive parsing so one missing field does not corrupt a whole dataset.
by LightningBytes Team
Handling Pagination in Scrapers
Offset, cursor and infinite-scroll pagination, detecting the end condition, deduplicating across pages, and resuming a crawl after a failure.
by LightningBytes Team
Async Python Scraping Without Breaking Rate Limits
Using asyncio with aiohttp or httpx for concurrent scraping, why more concurrency often means less throughput, and how to throttle per host without stalling.
by LightningBytes Team
Using cURL with a Proxy
A quick reference for proxying curl: HTTP and SOCKS5 syntax, credentials, environment variables, and verbose mode for diagnosing CONNECT failures.
by LightningBytes Team
Java Web Scraping: Complete Guide
Building scrapers in Java: fetching with the built-in HttpClient, parsing with Jsoup, driving a browser with Selenium, and configuring proxies for each.
by LightningBytes Team
Selenium Proxy Setup and Rotation
Configuring proxies in Selenium for Chrome and Firefox, handling proxy authentication, and rotating endpoints across driver instances safely.
by LightningBytes Team
Configuring Scrapy Proxy Middleware
Setting up Scrapy with a proxy, writing a rotating middleware with health tracking, and tuning throttle and retry settings so the spider backs off cleanly.
by LightningBytes Team
Beautiful Soup: Parsing HTML Without the Headache
Choosing a parser, writing selectors that survive redesigns, handling malformed HTML, and the mistakes that make a BeautifulSoup scraper break silently.
by LightningBytes Team
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