mitchellkrogza/nginx-ultimate-bad-bot-blocker

This project is a traffic-filtering system for Nginx, the web server software that many websites run on. Its purpose is to identify and block unwanted visitors before they reach your site, including automated programs known as bots that scrape content, probe for security weaknesses, or generate fake traffic. The blocker also handles spam referrers, which are false website addresses that bad actors send to pollute your analytics. As of its latest version it maintains a list of over 7,000 bad referrer addresses, nearly 700 suspicious user-agent signatures, and more than 200 programs that pretend to be Google's legitimate search crawler. Installation works through a set of shell scripts. You download a single installer file, run it in a test mode first to preview the changes it would make, then run it again with a flag that actually applies those changes. The scripts download configuration files, update your Nginx settings, and can insert the necessary lines into your existing website configuration files automatically. A separate update script can be scheduled to run regularly so the blocklists stay current without manual work. The system also includes rate limiting to slow down or stop denial-of-service attempts, and it integrates with Fail2Ban, a tool that tracks repeated offending IP addresses and can lock them out for a period of time. There is a specific feature for blocking services that detect which WordPress theme a site is running, which are often used by competitors or scrapers. A whitelist mechanism exists so legitimate crawlers, such as the real Googlebot, and trusted IP addresses are never blocked. The project is maintained and updated frequently, publishing new blocklists on a regular basis. It is written primarily in Shell and was created by an independent developer. FreeBSD users can install it through the operating system's package manager in addition to the standard Linux setup method. The full README is longer than what was shown.