How to install and configure Tinyproxy, a lightweight proxy server

June 20, 2010 • By admin • General

Tinyproxy is a light-weight HTTP proxy daemon for POSIX operating systems. Designed from the ground up to be fast and yet small, it is an ideal solution for use cases such as embedded deployments where a full featured HTTP proxy is required, but the system resources for a larger proxy are unavailable. Tinyproxy is free software, distributed using the GNU GPL license.

Installation

On Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or CentOS, install from the EPEL repository:

yum install tinyproxy

Ubuntu or Debian users can run:

sudo apt-get install tinyproxy

Optionally, visit the Tinyproxy download page and install from source if a binary for your system is not available.

Manual

You may look at the manual page before you jump into configuration:

man tinyproxy tinyproxy.conf

Configuration

Edit the config file at /etc/tinyproxy/tinyproxy.conf. Adjust the port:

Port 8080

Set which IP addresses are allowed to connect:

Allow 127.0.0.1
Allow YOUR.EXTERNAL.IP.ADDRESS

Configuration is completed. Restart the service:

sudo /etc/init.d/tinyproxy restart

Your proxy server is now ready. Configure your browser to use the server's IP address as proxy with port 8080.