useragent-picker-cli

UA generator

Generates random but realistic user agents (UAs) on a command line (or via API, if you like).

$ uagen mobile chrome
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; TAS-AN00) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.64 HuaweiBrowser/10.0.5.300 Mobile Safari/537.36

Use case

You want to:

• generate realistic-looking user agents with curl, wget, httpie etc
• stop tediously searching for, copying, and pasting user agent strings from long UA lists
• have realistic-looking HTTP requests using common user agent strings via curl and friends
• filter the UAs you choose depending on OS, platform (desktop, mobile, tablet), and browser
• refrain from checking the UA generator doco every single time to see if it's actually --msie, --ie, or --iexplore.

Installation

$ pip install --user useragent-picker-cli

Alternatively, visit https://pypi.org/project/useragent-picker-cli/ to download the install files directly.

Once installed, the command you run is `uagen`.

Usage

uagen can be used by listing some filter criteria you'd like to use:

$ uagen chrome macos   # Chrome on MacOS
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3987.116 Safari/537.36

$ uagen chrome osx     # Chrome on MacOS again
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/72.0.3626.121 Safari/537.36

There are many aliases, so just try what makes sense to you and it will probably work. If not, submit an issue!

If you want something a little niche that's not in the supported keyword list, uagen will search through browser UAs as a fallback:

$ uagen trident
** 'trident' didn't match any known filters, looking for matching browser strings
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko

uagen simply outputs a single user agent matching your criteria. This can be combined with CLI HTTP tools like this:

$ curl --user-agent "$(uagen)" http://example.com
$ curl -v --user-agent "$(uagen nokia mobile)" http://example.com
...
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: example.com
> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; Nokia 7 plus) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.93 Mobile Safari/537.360

You could also alias this for convenience:

$ alias uacurl='curl --user-agent "$(uagen)"
$ uacurl -v http://example.com
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: example.com
> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3987.132 Safari/537.36

Since uagen respects weightings based on usage in the wild, if you ran it 1000 times, you'd get a rough % breakdown of UAs like actual usage. TODO: weightings coming soon.

Programatic usage

ua-gen-cli is primarily designed for CLI use, but you can use it programatically too if you'd like:

from ua_gen.cli import UAGen
ua = UAGen()
print(ua.get_ua(["mobile"]))
print(ua.get_ua(["firefox", "desktop"]))

Data source

The user agent data file used lives at $HOME/.ua_cli_gen/enriched_ua_db.json, so feel free to have a look.

Acknowledgements

This project was inspired by and relies on data from https://github.com/intoli/user-agents.