Polipo was the best HTTP proxy when it emerged. Since then web behavior has a lot changed and HTTPS became popular. HTTPS prevents intermediates to read traffic and cache them. Polipo is not maintained currently but useful for different cases.

Install For Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Kali

We can install polipo for Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Kali with the apt-get command like below.

$ sudo apt-get install polipo

Install For Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Kali

We can also install polipo web cache proxy with the yum command like below.

$ yum install polipo

Configuration File

Polipo configuration file is stored in the /etc/polipo/polipo . We will use this configuration file in order to change the configuration. We can set configuration like Proxy Address, Allowed Clients, Log etc.

List Configuration Options

There are a lot of configuration options supported by the polipo. We can list the options with the -v option to the polipo command like below. Interestingly this option requires root privileges which is provided by sudo in the following example.

$ sudo polipo -v

Set Proxy Address

By default, the proxy will listen for local proxy connections. We can enable polipo to listen given IP address for network-wide proxy connection. We will use proxyAddress configuration and provide a network interface IP address for this into /etc/polipo/polipo configuration file. Polipo will listen port TCP 8123 by default.

proxyAddress = 192.168.122

Set Allowed Clients

We can allow or deny the client those can connect to our polipo proxy. We will use allowedClients option. We can provide the network address in a CIDR format or client range with a dash.

allowedClients=192.168.122.0/24

OR we can use asterisk * to specify the whole network address range

allowedClients=192.168.122.*

We can also use asterisk for network number part like below.

allowedClients=192.168.*.*

Display Polipo Service Status

We can use systemctl command to list polipo service status like below.

$ sudo systemctl status polipo

Restart Service to Reload Configuration

After making some configuration change in the /etc/polipo/polipo we need to restart the polipo proxy service to make these changes effect. We will use systemctl command like below which will restart polipo and reload the configuration.

$ sudo systemctl restart polipo

Example Client Config For Apt Command

There are a lot of applications which can use proxy to connect internet. Apt command can be used with a proxy configuration. We can configuration Apt with the following line to connect a proxy like polipo.

Acquire::http::Proxy "http://192.168.0.1:8123";

Example Client Config For Firefox

We can also configure Firefox browser in order to use polipo proxy server where port number is TCP 8123.  Open following configuration Edit->Preferences->Connection Settings->Maual Proxy Configuration