botagent

botagent is a Rust library for detecting bot user agents using regular expressions. It reads patterns from a JSON file, compiles them into a regex, and checks user agents against these patterns.

Features

• Bot Detection: Identify whether a given user agent string matches known bot patterns.
• Customizable: Use your own bot patterns by providing a JSON file.
• Efficient: Uses the pcre2 crate for high-performance regex matching.
• Error Handling: Robust error handling with detailed messages.

Installation

To use this library in your project, add the following to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
botagent = "0.1"

Or by run cargo add botagent command.

Usage

Check if User Agent is a Bot

To check if a given user agent string matches any known bot patterns:

use botagent::is_bot;

fn main() {
    let is_bot = is_bot("Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)", "patterns.json").unwrap();
    println!("Is bot: {}", is_bot);
}

Find the Matching Bot Pattern

If you want to know which bot pattern matched the user agent:

use botagent::is_bot_match;

fn main() {
    let matched_pattern = is_bot_match("Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)", "patterns.json").unwrap();
    if let Some(pattern) = matched_pattern {
        println!("Matched bot pattern: {}", pattern);
    } else {
        println!("No bot pattern matched.");
    }
}

Patterns File Format

The bot patterns are stored in a JSON file, with each pattern being a regular expression string. Here is an example patterns.json:

[
  "(?<! (?:channel/|google/))google(?!(app|/google| pixel))",
  "(?<! cu)bots?(?:\\b|_)"
]

Each string in the array is a pattern that will be compiled into a single regular expression to match against user agent strings.

Running Tests

To run the tests, you can use the following command:

cargo test

This will also run the documentation tests to ensure that all code examples in the documentation are correct.

Accuracy

This library follows the original logic and pattern list from isbot and it uses a regular expression that matches bots and only bots. I'll try to ensure it aligns closely with the original logic, but tailored to work seamlessly in a Rust environment, feel free to reach out with any feedback or suggestions!

Credits

This library was inspired by and largely based on the work from isbot. The original TypeScript code was rewritten in Rust.