I ran a bunch of HTTP GET requests to the iTunes API endpoint below to query for a list of artist ids (200 at a time).
My script worked well for the past few months, but lately every single request coming from my server is served with a 403 status. I re-ran the same queries on my local machine and they worked fine. Then I reallocated a different IP to my server and the requests were sporadically served (most still return as 403s). Even requests for a single artist id were served 403s.
import requests
artist_ids = "<id1>,<id2>,..."
itunes_search_url = "https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id={0}".format(artist_ids)
r = requests.get(itunes_search_url)
print r.status_code
=> 403
Does anyone know if Apple started enforcing stricter rules around the number of requests that can be made to their Search API from a single IP? I wonder if they have different rules for EC2 instances IPs than regular IPs?!
Closing this now, it looks like Apple recommends caching of the search API results, which is the only way I got this to work.