First of all, I needed a way to simulate real life user interaction with a website. For this, you need a browser. My first choice was PhantomJs but it turned out to be difficult to work with. After a lot of research, I finally stayed with headless chrome.

So now, that I had a browser, I needed to simulate user interaction. Also, I wanted the views to be from different parts of the world, not just from one IP address, so for that I needed to somehow use proxy’s. I found a way to either use a proxy from a file, or always load the latest proxy list from an online source.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/clarketm/proxy-list/master/proxy-list.txt

After I had the proxy’s, I needed the interaction to seem random, so I randomized the browser headers, the links the bot followed and the length of time it stayed on a page.

Finally I had a running script that could generate 200+ views.

My first page view generator was ready and tested. You can find technical information in the README of the project.

Here is the code for those who are eager to give it a try:

https://gitlab.com/Gadratil/pvg