LWP::RobotUA(3)

💖 NAME 💖

okay bestie, welcome to LWP::RobotUA(3) — yes, from the User Contributed Perl Documentation — and this page is all about LWP::RobotUA, aka a class for well-behaved Web robots. 🫶

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

  use LWP::RobotUA;
  my $ua = LWP::RobotUA->new('my-robot/0.1', 'me@foo.com');
  $ua->delay(10);  # be very nice -- max one hit every ten minutes!
  ...

  # Then just use it just like a normal LWP::UserAgent:
  my $response = $ua->get('http://whatever.int/...');
  ...

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So this class implements a user agent that is suitable for robot applications. No cap: robots should be nice to the servers they visit. They should consult the /robots.txt file to make sure they are welcomed, and they should not make requests too frequently. 💅

But before you consider writing a robot, take a look at http://www.robotstxt.org/.

When you use an LWP::RobotUA object as your user agent, you do not really have to think about these things yourself — robots.txt files are automatically consulted and obeyed, the server isn't queried too rapidly, and so on. Just send requests like you do when you're using a normal LWP::UserAgent object (using $ua->get(...), $ua->head(...), $ua->request(...), etc.), and this special agent will make sure you are nice. ✨

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💅 METHODS 💅

LWP::RobotUA is a sub-class of LWP::UserAgent and implements the same methods. On top of that, the following methods are provided:

🎀 new 🎀

        my $ua = LWP::RobotUA->new( %options )
        my $ua = LWP::RobotUA->new( $agent, $from )
        my $ua = LWP::RobotUA->new( $agent, $from, $rules )

The LWP::UserAgent options agent and from are mandatory — like, you literally gotta give both. The options delay, use_sleep and rules initialize attributes private to the RobotUA. If rules are not provided, then WWW::RobotRules is instantiated providing an internal database of robots.txt. 🧚

It is also possible to just pass the value of agent, from and optionally rules as plain positional arguments. Easy.

🌸 delay 🌸

        my $delay = $ua->delay;
        $ua->delay( $minutes );

Get/set the minimum delay between requests to the same server, in minutes. The default is 1 minute. Note that this number doesn't have to be an integer; for example, this sets the delay to 10 seconds:

        $ua->delay(10/60);

🦋 use_sleep 🦋

        my $bool = $ua->use_sleep;
        $ua->use_sleep( $boolean );

Get/set a value indicating whether the UA should "sleep" in LWP::RobotUA if requests arrive too fast, defined as $ua->delay minutes not passed since last request to the given server. The default is true. If this value is false then an internal SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE response will be generated. It will have a Retry-After header that indicates when it is OK to send another request to this server. ⏳

💜 rules 💜

        my $rules = $ua->rules;
        $ua->rules( $rules );

Set/get which WWW::RobotRules object to use.

🍓 no_visits 🍓

        my $num = $ua->no_visits( $netloc )

Returns the number of documents fetched from this server host. Yeah I know, this method should probably have been named num_visits or something like that. :-( — the naming is a whole vibe, but it is what it is. 🙈

🔥 host_wait 🔥

        my $num = $ua->host_wait( $netloc )

Returns the number of seconds (from now) you must wait before you can make a new request to this host.

⭐ as_string ⭐

        my $string = $ua->as_string;

Returns a string that describes the state of the UA. Mainly useful for debugging. 👑

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

Go peek at LWP::UserAgent and WWW::RobotRules, bestie. 💖

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👑 COPYRIGHT 👑

Copyright 1996-2004 Gisle Aas.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

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mwah 💋 — this page is from perl v5.42.0, dated 2026-05-18, and yes, it's LWP::RobotUA(3). 🫶✨