Proxy generator to replace gimmeproxy.com

[howdoicomputer]

As of right now, proxies are generated by making API calls to gimmeproxy as evidenced by this code here:

  def generate_proxy
    proxy_api_response = Mechanize.new.get(
      "http://gimmeproxy.com/api/getProxy?api_key=#{ENV['FINDAHOME_GIMMEPROXY_KEY']}?protocol=http"
    ).content

    proxy = JSON.parse(proxy_api_response)

    { ip: proxy['ip'], port: proxy['port'] }
  end

It's really simple code that just hits their API and returns a random, verified proxy's address and port. This works pretty dang well but the API service costs $15 a month - I don't want to spend $15 month on this.

To get an understanding of the problem, I highly suggesting reading the three blog posts published by gimmeproxy's founder http://256cats.com/gimmeproxy-source-part1/

So, there are a few alternatives to using gimmeproxy:

1. Don't crawl at all and become an officially endorsed platform by the City of San Jose (lol).
2. Have something similar to a cron job setup that runs https://github.com/chill117/proxy-lists and https://github.com/256cats/check-proxy and then persists what those two produce to either a file or a database and then have Ruby consume that data.
3. Write a Ruby version of check-proxy and proxy-lists and use that.

I think I like solution two the best as it's the least amount of work that solves the problem. However, it'll add additional management complexity to the application.

[howdoicomputer]

I'm willing to eat the costs on this for three months.