The 'isbot' npm package is a lightweight utility for detecting bots, crawlers, and spiders based on the user agent string. It helps developers identify non-human traffic to their websites or applications.
Basic Bot Detection
This feature allows you to check if a given user agent string belongs to a bot. The function returns true if the user agent is identified as a bot, otherwise false.
const isBot = require('isbot');
const userAgent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)';
console.log(isBot(userAgent)); // trueCustom Bot Patterns
You can extend the default bot detection patterns with custom patterns. This is useful if you have specific bots that are not covered by the default list.
const isBot = require('isbot');
isBot.extend(['my-custom-bot']);
const userAgent = 'my-custom-bot';
console.log(isBot(userAgent)); // trueBot Detection in HTTP Requests
This feature demonstrates how to use 'isbot' to detect bots in incoming HTTP requests. Depending on whether the user agent is a bot, the server responds with a different message.
const isBot = require('isbot');
const http = require('http');
http.createServer((req, res) => {
if (isBot(req.headers['user-agent'])) {
res.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': 'text/plain' });
res.end('Hello, bot!');
} else {
res.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': 'text/plain' });
res.end('Hello, human!');
}
}).listen(3000);The 'useragent' package provides detailed parsing of user agent strings, including bot detection. It offers more comprehensive information about the user agent, such as browser, version, and OS, but may be more complex to use compared to 'isbot'.
The 'express-useragent' package is an Express middleware for parsing user agent strings. It includes bot detection and provides additional details about the user agent. It is specifically designed for use with Express.js applications.
The 'ua-parser-js' package is a JavaScript library for parsing user agent strings. It includes bot detection and provides detailed information about the browser, engine, OS, and device. It is a more general-purpose library compared to 'isbot'.
Detect bots/crawlers/spiders using the user agent string.
import isbot from 'isbot'
// Nodejs HTTP
isbot(request.getHeader('User-Agent'))
// ExpressJS
isbot(req.get('user-agent'))
// Browser
isbot(navigator.userAgent)
// User Agent string
isbot('Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)') // true
isbot('Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2228.0 Safari/537.36') // false
Add rules to user agent match RegExp: Array of strings
isbot('Mozilla/5.0') // false
isbot.extend([
'istat',
'^mozilla/\\d\\.\\d$'
])
isbot('Mozilla/5.0') // true
Remove rules to user agent match RegExp (see existing rules in src/list.json file)
isbot('Chrome-Lighthouse') // true
isbot.exclude(['chrome-lighthouse']) // pattern is case insensitive
isbot('Chrome-Lighthouse') // false
Return the respective match for bot user agent rule
isbot.find('Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 DejaClick/2.9.7.2') // 'DejaClick'
Return all patterns that match the user agent string
isbot.matches('Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 SearchRobot/1.0') // ['bot', 'search']
Remove all matching patterns so this user agent string will pass
const ua = 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0 SearchRobot/1.0';
isbot(ua) // true
isbot.clear(ua)
isbot(ua) // false
Create new instances of isbot. Instance is spawned using spawner's list as base
const one = isbot.spawn()
const two = isbot.spawn()
two.exclude(['chrome-lighthouse'])
one('Chrome-Lighthouse') // true
two('Chrome-Lighthouse') // false
Create isbot using custom list (instead of the maintained list)
const lean = isbot.spawn([ 'bot' ])
lean('Googlebot') // true
lean('Chrome-Lighthouse') // false
const { pattern } = isbot
This package aims to identify "Good bots". Those who voluntarily identify themselves by setting a unique, preferably descriptive, user agent, usually by setting a dedicated request header.
It does not try to recognise malicious bots or programs disguising themselves as real users.
Recognising good bots such as web crawlers is useful for multiple purposes. Although it is not recommended to serve different content to web crawlers like Googlebot, you can still elect to
It is not recommended to whitelist requests for any reason based on user agent header only. Instead other methods of identification can be added such as reverse dns lookup.
We use external data sources on top of our own lists to keep up to date
Missing something? Please open an issue
Remove testing for node 6 and 8
Change return value for isbot: true instead of matched string
No functional change
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FAQs
🤖/👨🦰 Recognise bots/crawlers/spiders using the user agent string.
The npm package isbot receives a total of 532,917 weekly downloads. As such, isbot popularity was classified as popular.
We found that isbot demonstrated a healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released less than a year ago. It has 2 open source maintainers collaborating on the project.
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