Best practices for custom http user-agent strings?

Question

I'm developing an application that communicates with an internal web service using HTTP.

Are there any "best practices" for custom user-agent strings so that I can put a nice one in my app? It's a Python library and the lower transport is Python's own httplib. Should the user-agent string say that or something else?

Answer 1

You can write in user-agent what you want! But if you beware of your application HTTP queries to this server may be blocked, set user-agent to common browser (like Firefox on Gecko engine) then server admin don't know what application reads her page and in server logs don't see your application.

Answer 2

For internal use you can use anything really.

Of course, internal or external its always a good idea to include contact information, either web or email address, in case something breaks or application goes out of control.

Check this big list of user agents for inspiration: http://www.user-agents.org/