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reddit.com › r/python › praw user_agent (i'm a noob)

r/Python on Reddit: PRAW user_agent (I'm a noob)

April 19, 2013 -

Hi, I'm trying to learn Python and I thought I'd mess around with praw. When creating a Reddit object, the format is r = praw.Reddit(user_agent = 'example') """this is what i saw on the praw docs"""

My question is: What is user_agent, and should I use the String 'example' when I make a Reddit object? The praw docs make it seem important: "NEVER lie about your user-agent. This includes spoofing popular browsers and spoofing other bots. We will ban liars with extreme prejudice."

So what should my user_agent be?

Top answer

1 of 2

A user agent header is a string of text that is sent with HTTP requests to identify the program making the request (the program is called a "user agent"). Web browsers commonly send these in order to identify themselves (so the server can tell if you're using Chrome or Firefox, for example). Many APIs will want you to use a unique user agent string for your program. This is so that if your program misbehaves for some reason, they can more easily identify it, rather than have it look like a browser or just a generic default (this is why they tell you not to spoof a browser). The user agent is something that a human might read at some point in a log somewhere, so it's useful to include something like the name of your program and, in case of Reddit, your username in it. That way, if your program is doing something wrong, the admin reading the server logs can figure out how to talk to you.

2 of 2

The useragent should be True, unique, descriptive, contain your username on Reddit and the version number of your application. Like u/D__ explained, it's used by Reddit to identify your program. As concrete examples of useragents there is the one on Reddit's documentation : super happy flair bot v1.0 by /u/spladug as well as the one on PRAW's getting-started page >>> user_agent = ("Karma breakdown 1.0 by /u/_Daimon_ " ... "github.com/Damgaard/Reddit-Bots/")

Read the Docs

praw.readthedocs.io › en › stable › getting_started › quick_start.html

Quick Start - PRAW 7.7.1 documentation

import praw reddit = praw.Reddit( client_id="my client id", client_secret="my client secret", user_agent="my user agent", )

Stack Overflow

stackoverflow.com › questions › 68889100 › how-do-i-find-user-agent

python - How do I find User Agent? - Stack Overflow

reddit = praw.Reddit(client_id='CLIENT_ID HERE', client_secret='CLIENT_SECRET HERE', user_agent='USER_AGENT HERE')

Read the Docs

praw.readthedocs.io › en › stable › getting_started › configuration › prawini.html

praw.ini Files - PRAW 7.7.1 documentation

reddit = praw.Reddit("bot2", user_agent="bot2 user agent")

Read the Docs

praw.readthedocs.io › en › v3.6.2

PRAW: The Python Reddit Api Wrapper — PRAW 3.6.2 documentation

>>> import praw · Create the Reddit object (requires a user-agent): >>> r = praw.Reddit(user_agent='Test Script by /u/bboe') Logging in: >>> r.login('username', 'password') Send a message (requires login): >>> r.send_message('user', 'Subject Line', 'You are awesome!') Mark all unread messages as read (requires login): >>> for msg in r.get_unread(limit=None): ...

Read the Docs

praw.readthedocs.io › en › latest › getting_started › quick_start.html

Quick Start - PRAW 7.8.2.dev0 documentation

import praw reddit = praw.Reddit( client_id="my client id", client_secret="my client secret", user_agent="my user agent", )

PyPI

pypi.org › project › praw

praw · PyPI

import praw reddit = praw.Reddit( client_id="CLIENT_ID", client_secret="CLIENT_SECRET", password="PASSWORD", user_agent="USERAGENT", username="USERNAME", )

      » pip install praw

Published Oct 25, 2024

Version 7.8.1

Repository https://github.com/praw-dev/praw

GitHub

github.com › amcquade › fresh_script › issues › 63

`praw.Reddit` instance does not use a unique user-agent · Issue #63 · amcquade/fresh_script

April 7, 2019 - This site_name is then used to create a praw.Reddit instance within main: ... user_agent = ' '.join([ "Python3:FreshScript:(commit 29a482a)", "(by /u/<reddit_user>)", "(https://github.com/amcquade/fresh_script)" ]) reddit = praw.Reddit('bot1', user_agent=user_agent)

Published Sep 17, 2019

Read the Docs

praw.readthedocs.io › en › v2.0.15 › pages › getting_started.html

Getting Started — PRAW 2.0 documentation

Start by firing up Python and importing PRAW. You can find the installation instructions on the main page ... Next we need to connect to reddit and identify our script. We do this through the user_agent we supply when our script first connects to reddit.

Stack Overflow

stackoverflow.com › questions › 22833116 › praw-api-login-fails-with-client-error

python - Praw: API Login Fails with Client Error - Stack Overflow

Change your client's User-Agent ... your username as contact information, in the following format: <platform>:<app ID>:<version string> (by /u/<reddit username>)...

Find elsewhere

Google Bing Mojeek

Chatbots

chatbots.studio › home › blog › how to make a reddit bot with python

How to make a Reddit bot with Python | Chatbots.Studio

August 20, 2020 - reddit = praw.Reddit(client_id=”CLIENT_ID”, client_secret=”CLIENT_SECRET”, password=”PASSWORD”, user_agent=”USERAGENT”, username=”USERNAME”) With the reddit instance you can then interact with Reddit by different ways: # Create a submission to r/test ·

GitHub

github.com › praw-dev › praw

GitHub - praw-dev/praw: PRAW, an acronym for "Python Reddit API Wrapper", is a python package that allows for simple access to Reddit's API.

import praw reddit = praw.Reddit( client_id="CLIENT_ID", client_secret="CLIENT_SECRET", password="PASSWORD", user_agent="USERAGENT", username="USERNAME", )

Starred by 3.9K users

Forked by 485 users

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Read the Docs

praw.readthedocs.io › en › v3.6.2 › pages › configuration_files.html

The Configuration Files — PRAW 3.6.2 documentation

import praw r = praw.Reddit(user_agent='Custom Site Example for PRAW', site_name='YOUR_SITE')

reddit.com › r/redditdev › working on praw bot. curious about user agents and urllib

r/redditdev on Reddit: Working on Praw bot. Curious about user agents and urllib

July 30, 2020 -

Building a praw bot. Would appreciate it if you guys could answer a few questions for me

Tutorial I'm following: https://www.pythonforengineers.com/build-a-reddit-bot-part-1/

In the praw.ini file, I had to list the user agent for the bot. I'm familiar with what a user agent is in general (an identifier for your browser and system in an http request). However, the tutorial I'm following above says,

Libraries like Python’s urllib are severely restricted by Reddit to prevent abuse. Reddit recommends you use your own special user agent, and that’s what we’ll do.

Why is urllib restricted by Reddit and why is it recommended I use a special user agent? Plus, wouldn't this be considered user agent spoofing?

Edit: What does reddit even mean by special user agent? Does it mean I have to create a unique identifier for my api client? Also, isnt there a way to make a custom user agent in urllib? Hypothetically if I were to use urllib for my bot how would reddit even know if I changed the user agent?

Top answer

1 of 1

Don't worry about any of that urllib business. You won't need to bother since you're using PRAW. For the user agent, see the wiki . Special = unique.

reddit.com › r/redditdev › [praw] what is the equivalent of user_agent for a normal human user?

r/redditdev on Reddit: [PRAW] What is the equivalent of user_agent for a normal human user?

April 19, 2015 - So there's no "equivalent" for a normal human user - every connection to reddit has a user agent, and the agent depends on how they're connecting.

Read the Docs

praw.readthedocs.io › en › v3.6.2 › pages › code_overview.html

Code Overview — PRAW 3.6.2 documentation

PRAW, an acronym for “Python Reddit API Wrapper”, is a python package that allows for simple access to reddit’s API. PRAW aims to be as easy to use as possible and is designed to follow all of reddit’s API rules. You have to give a useragent, everything else is handled by PRAW so you ...

BlackHatWorld

blackhatworld.com › home › forums › social media › reddit

When using my upvoting script, my account activity keeps saying praw, how do I spoof this? | BlackHatWorld

April 1, 2023 - I then discovered a method to grow my karma rapidly which has. been working very well so far. In 10 days I got up to 20,000 karma. Here's the problem. When I go to reddit dot com/account-activity, my user agent says PRAW, which I fear will be a problem when I start gaining posting to public subreddits and am seen by others.

reddit.com › r/redditdev › how can i use my praw user agent data in a requests get header?

r/redditdev on Reddit: How can I use my PRAW user agent data in a requests GET header?

December 23, 2020 -

My PRAW instance is authorised to scrape data from a quarantined sub. However, my application depends on requests' GET function to view the .json data for each post, e.g.,

req = requests.get(URL, headers={

"User-agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/89.0.4389.114 Safari/537.36"

}

...where URL is some Reddit post's URL with ".json" appended.

How do I structure the "User-agent" header to contain the user information I'm passing into my Reddit instance of PRAW so that I avoid a Forbidden 403?

Top answer

1 of 1

What matters is not the user agent, but rather the access token. Assuming that you just need the deserialized JSON and don't actually care about using requests directly, I suspect the thing to do here is use the prawcore session contained in the Reddit instance, e.g.: response = r._core.request('GET', '/comments/migy7t') Note that I've trimmed the URL down to just the necessary parts of the path, as seen in the API docs . You could also use praw's endpoint constants as a way of constructing the path: path = praw.endpoints.API_PATH["submission"].format(id='migy7t') response = r._core.request('GET', path)

GeeksforGeeks

geeksforgeeks.org › python › how-to-get-client_id-and-client_secret-for-python-reddit-api-registration

How to get client_id and client_secret for Python Reddit API registration ? - GeeksforGeeks

July 12, 2025 - reddit = praw.Reddit(client_id ='my client id', client_secret ='my client secret', user_agent ='my user agent', username ='my username', password ='my password') In order to get the information for these fields:

Stack Overflow

stackoverflow.com › questions › 40293494 › praw-python-reddit-api-wrapper-not-working

pip - PRAW: Python Reddit API Wrapper not working - Stack Overflow

Top answer

1 of 1

[Promoted/expanded from a comment]

As pointed out by @bboe, the PRAW docs can be located here ¹.

Specifically, you want the Getting Started ¹ page which walks you through instantiating a Reddit object in read-only or read/write mode.

¹ PRAW 4 documentation is no longer available onlne, so I've updated the links to track the latest version.