How to block bots on nginx less resourcefully - by IP or user-agent?

Question

Nginx

There is a VPS with ISPmanager panel and nginx+php-fpm. Bot PetalBot storms one of the sites (but I would even block it for everyone just in case). It is better to prescribe access prohibition by user-agent in the nginx config for the site

if ($http_user_agent ~* PetalBot) {
      return 403;
  }

or deny access for the IP range

location / {
    deny  114.119.160.0/16;
    deny  114.119.161.0/16;
    deny  114.119.162.0/16;
    deny  114.119.163.0/16;
    deny  114.119.164.0/16;
    deny  114.119.165.0/16;
    deny  114.119.166.0/16;
    deny  114.119.167.0/16;
}

Or somehow it is necessary to prohibit even earlier and then even in the access.log logs they will not be fixed? I don't know much about setting up servers.

Answer 1

Kill on the firewall by address ranges - then nothing will appear in the logs.

Answer 2

If the attacks are targeted, then a hacker can change the user_agent without any problems. I advise you to ban both by IP address and by user_agent.

Answer 3

That's only if you are blocking exactly unwanted bots, it's better to `return 444;`

Answer 4

Yes, I also created an overload. This is a huawei search engine robot - https://vk.com/@news_newusman-rss-722804822-1394310157 - just block it in robots. You can still end up in htaccess or nginx, to be sure.