Linux proxy server or proxy server generally is a server that saves the visited web pages for later requests, so if you try to visit the same web page or any one else, the page will be retrieved from the proxy server.

This is very useful, it makes web surfing much faster and reduces the traffic which means less cost.

Caching servers can decrease external traffic up to 45%.

Another main advantage for proxy servers, you can configure the proxy with some settings for access control. For example, you can restrict access to specific websites.

If you surf the web before from an anonymous proxy, this is actually a proxy server.

You can choose any of the available Linux proxy servers out there like:

Squid, Varnish, Polipo, TinyProxy, and more.

In this post, we will discuss the most common Linux proxy server which is Squid.

sudo apt install squid

sudo systemctl start squid
sudo systemctl enable squid

You can check the configuration file in /etc/squid/squid.conf.

Before we dig into the configuration, let’s see the proxy server in action.

Just change the proxy setting on your browser to the IP address of the proxy and the port 3128 since this is the squid default port.

You can change the default port by changing the http_port option in the configuration file.