tinyproxy/tinyproxy

Tinyproxy is a small, lightweight proxy server for Linux and other POSIX systems. A proxy server sits between your computer (or a group of computers on a local network) and the internet, forwarding web requests on their behalf. Tinyproxy is designed specifically for situations where you need that functionality without the resource overhead of a full-featured proxy. The tool is written in C and released under the GNU General Public License. It handles HTTP and HTTPS traffic. One of its notable behaviors is connection buffering: when a web server sends a fast response, Tinyproxy will receive the full response and then relay it to the client at whatever speed the client can handle. This smooths out mismatches in connection speed between the server side and the client side. Tinyproxy supports several optional features that can be enabled at compile time. These include domain and URL filtering (blocking access to specific sites), support for chaining connections through another upstream proxy, transparent proxying (where the proxy works automatically via firewall rules without clients needing to know about it), and reverse proxying (where the proxy forwards incoming requests to a backend server rather than outgoing requests to the internet). Building it from source follows the standard Linux build process: run a configuration script, compile, then install. The release tarballs come with the configure script pre-generated, so building from a release is straightforward. Building from the git repository requires running one additional script first to generate that configure script. For small networks that need to share an internet connection and restrict traffic to web requests only, Tinyproxy is a minimal option. It is not aimed at large-scale deployments where a heavier proxy would be more appropriate.