core

🤖 Bottica Core

The bottica specification and list of verifiers: bottica.yaml.

The bottica object contains a single entry, bots. Its value is a list of bots, which have a name and one or more verifiers. A json-schema of bottica is available at schema.yaml.

We aim for bot names to be in with sync their User-Agent family as parsed by the ua-parser project (UAP) to maximize interoperability.

In all entries where an IP is required, bottica supports both IPv4 and IPv6.

✅ Verifiers

Each entry in bottica can have one or more verifiers. For example, Pinterestbot traffic should be both verified by FCrDNS, and it should come from a specific IP range:

- name: Pinterestbot
  ip_ranges:
    - min: 54.236.1.1
      max: 54.236.1.255
  fcrdns_hosts:
    - pinterest.com

The supported verifiers are:

• 🔄 fcrdns_hosts: Forward-confirmed reverse DNS.
• 📃 ip_list: Simple IP whitelist
• 🏔 ip_ranges: Whitelisting of ranges of IPs
• 🍎 cidr_list: Whitelisting of CIDR blocks

🔄 FCrDNS hosts

fcrdns_hosts should contain a list of hosts that are allowed to participate in a FCrDNS lookup:

1. A reverse DNS query is performed on an IP to check its reported hostname
2. A DNS query is performed on the hostname to get its reported list of IPs. The original IP should appear in the hosts list of IPs if the reported host name hasn't been spoofed.

If the list fcrdns_hosts list is present but empty, an FCrDNS check will be performed, with a positive verification as long as the IP matches the host's reported IP list. If there are hosts listed under fcrdns_hosts, then the verification will additionally only succeed if the last part of the hostname matches one of the entries.

Example

- name: Googlebot
  fcrdns_hosts:
    - google.com
    - googlebot.com

📃 IP list

A simple whitelist of allowed IP addresses.

Example

- name: DuckDuckBot
  ip_list:
    - 23.21.227.69
    - 50.16.241.113
    - 50.16.241.114
    - 50.16.241.117
    - 50.16.247.234
    - 52.204.97.54
    - 52.5.190.19
    - 54.197.234.188
    - 54.208.100.253
    - 54.208.102.37
    - 107.21.1.8

🏔 IP ranges

A list of IP ranges, one of which must contain the bot's IP. A range is specified with the min IP and the max IP, with both boundaries being inclusive.

Example

- name: Pinterestbot
  ip_ranges:
    - min: 54.236.1.1
      max: 54.236.1.255

🍎 CIDR list

A list of CIDR blocks, one of which must contain the bot's IP address.

Example

- name: AhrefsBot
  # https://ahrefs.com/robot
  cidr_list:
    - 54.36.148.0/24
    - 54.36.149.0/24
    - 54.36.150.0/24
    - 195.154.122.0/24
    - 195.154.123.0/24
    - 195.154.126.0/24
    - 195.154.127.0/24

➕ UAP Extras

Since ua-parser is an external dependency, it is sometimes necessary to make some additions or tweaks to their parsing, e.g. in cases where a major bot is missing, or when their parsed family is too specific (think of one bot going under many different names, which would all require separate entries in bottica). uap_extras.yaml provides overrides and additions to the User-Agent parsing from uap-core. These should only contain a regex to match, and possibly a family_name override for setting the bot's name. If provided, family_name must match one of the bot names in bottica. If not provided, the first matching group of the regex must always match one of the bot names in bottica.