Again, the main configuration file is named By default, the main configuration file is named config on - Linux/Unix/BSD and OS/2, and , + with the exception of Windows, where it is named config.txt on Windows. +>. Configuration lines consist of an initial keyword followed by a list of values, all separated by whitespace (any number of spaces or tabs). For example:
Privoxy's operation that are not location dependent (i.e. they apply universally, no matter - where you may be surfing).Two example URLs are provided
UnsetThe directory where all logging takes place - (i.e. where logfile and - jarfile are located). +> is located).
standard.action # Internal purposes, no editing recommended
match-all.action # Actions that are applied to all sites and maybe overruled later on.default.action # Main actions file
default.action # Main actions fileuser.action # User customizations
user.action # User customizations
- The default values include standard.action, which is used
- for internal purposes and should be loaded, default.action,
- which is the , which is the
+ "main" actions file maintained by the developers, and
@@ -1152,79 +1155,8 @@ CLASS="SECT3"
> The file to store intercepted cookies in
- File name, relative to logdir Unset (commented out). When activated: jarfile (Unix) or privoxy.jar (Windows). Intercepted cookies are not stored in a dedicated log file.
- The jarfile may grow to ridiculous sizes over time.
- If debug 8 (show header parsing) is enabled, cookies are
- also written to the logfile with the rest of the headers.
- Therefore this option isn't very useful and may be removed
- in future releases. Please report to the developers if you
- are still using it.
- The hostname shown on the CGI pages.
+ Text Unset The hostname provided by the operating system is used.
+ On some misconfigured systems resolving the hostname fails or
+ takes too much time and slows Privoxy down. Setting a fixed hostname
+ works around the problem.
+ In other circumstances it might be desirable to show a hostname
+ other than the one returned by the operating system. For example
+ if the system has several different hostnames and you don't want
+ to use the first one.
+ Note that Privoxy does not validate the specified hostname value.
+ The IP address and TCP port on which The address and TCP port on which Privoxy will
@@ -1653,6 +1655,18 @@ CLASS="REPLACEABLE"
>Port [Hostname]:Port Bind to 127.0.0.1 (localhost), port 8118. This is suitable and recommended for
- home users who run Bind to 127.0.0.1 (IPv4 localhost), port 8118. This is suitable and
+ recommended for home users who run Privoxy on the same machine as
- their browser.
+> on
+ the same machine as their browser.
If you leave out the IP address, You can use this statement multiple times to make
+ Privoxy will
- bind to all interfaces (addresses) on your machine and may become reachable
- from the Internet. In that case, consider using listen on more ports or more
+ IP addresses. Suitable if your operating system does not
+ support sharing IPv6 and IPv4 protocols
+ on the same socket.
+ If a hostname is used instead of an IP address, Privoxy
+ will try to resolve it to an IP address and if there are multiple, use the first
+ one returned.
+ If the address for the hostname isn't already known on the system
+ (for example because it's in /etc/hostname), this may result in DNS
+ traffic.
+ If the specified address isn't available on the system, or if the
+ hostname can't be resolved, Privoxy
+ will fail to start.
+ IPv6 addresses containing colons have to be quoted by brackets.
+ They can only be used if Privoxy has
+ been compiled with IPv6 support. If you aren't sure if your version
+ supports it, have a look at
+ http://config.privoxy.org/show-status.
+ Some operating systems will prefer IPv6 to IPv4 addresses even if the
+ system has no IPv6 connectivity which is usually not expected by the user.
+ Some even rely on DNS to resolve localhost which mean the "localhost" address
+ used may not actually be local.
+ It is therefore recommended to explicitly configure the intended IP address
+ instead of relying on the operating system, unless there's a strong reason not to.
+ If you leave out the address, Privoxy will bind to all
+ IPv4 interfaces (addresses) on your machine and may become reachable from the
+ Internet and/or the local network. Be aware that some GNU/Linux distributions
+ modify that behaviour without updating the documentation. Check for non-standard
+ patches if your Privoxyversion behaves differently.
+ If you configure Privoxyto be reachable from the
+ network, consider using access control lists (ACL's, see below), and/or
- a firewall.
+>
+ (ACL's, see below), and/or a firewall.
If you open
With the exception noted above, listening on multiple addresses is currently
+ not supported by Privoxy directly.
+ It can be done on most operating systems by letting a packet filter
+ redirect request for certain addresses to Privoxy, though.
+ Suppose you are running Privoxy on an
+ IPv6-capable machine and you want it to listen on the IPv6 address
+ of the loopback device:
+ If your system implements
+ RFC 3493, then
+ src_addr and dst_addr can be IPv6 addresses delimeted by
+ brackets, port can be a number
+ or a service name, and
+ src_masklen and
+ dst_masklen can be a number
+ from 0 to 128.
+ Don't restrict access further than implied by listen-address
- Don't restrict access further than implied by listen-address
+ Access controls are included at the request of ISPs and systems
administrators, and Some systems allow IPv4 clients to connect to IPv6 server sockets.
+ Then the client's IPv4 address will be translated by the system into
+ IPv6 address space with special prefix ::ffff:0:0/96 (so called IPv4
+ mapped IPv6 address). Privoxy can handle it
+ and maps such ACL addresses automatically.
+ Denying access to particular sites by ACL may have undesired side effects
if the site in question is hosted on a machine which also hosts other sites
(most sites are).
@@ -2508,6 +2715,44 @@ CLASS="SCREEN"
>
+ Allow access from the IPv4 network 192.0.2.0/24 even if listening on
+ an IPv6 wild card address (not supported on all platforms):
+ This is equivalent to the following line even if listening on an
+ IPv4 address (not supported on all platforms):
+ http_parent can be a
+ numerical IPv6 address (if
+ RFC 3493 is
+ implemented). To prevent clashes with the port delimiter, the whole IP
+ address has to be put into brackets. On the other hand a target_pattern containing an IPv6 address
+ has to be put into angle brackets (normal brackets are reserved for
+ regular expressions already).
+ Multiple lines are OK, they are checked in sequence, and the last match wins.
Parent proxy specified by an IPv6 address:
+ Suppose your parent proxy doesn't support IPv6:
+ With forward-socks5 the DNS resolution will happen on the remote server as well.
+ socks_proxy and
+ http_parent can be a
+ numerical IPv6 address (if
+ RFC 3493 is
+ implemented). To prevent clashes with the port delimiter, the whole IP
+ address has to be put into brackets. On the other hand a target_pattern containing an IPv6 address
+ has to be put into angle brackets (normal brackets are reserved for
+ regular expressions already).
+ If Number of seconds after which an open connection will no longer be reused.
+ Time in seconds.
+ None Connections are not kept alive.
+ This option allows clients to keep the connection to Privoxy has a number of options specific to the
- Windows GUI interface: If "activity-animation" is set to 1, the
-
+ alive. If the server supports it, Privoxy icon will animate when
- "Privoxy" is active. To turn off, set to 0. activity-animation 1 If "log-messages" is set to 1,
- This option has no effect if Privoxy will log messages to the console
- window: log-messages 1 Several users have reported this as a Privoxy bug, so the
+ default value has been reduced. Consider increasing it to
+ 300 seconds or even more if you think your browser can handle
+ it. If your browser appears to be hanging it can't.
+ keep-alive-timeout 300
+ Assumed server-side keep-alive timeout if not specified by the server.
+ Time in seconds.
+ None Connections for which the server didn't specify the keep-alive
+ timeout are not reused.
+ Enabling this option significantly increases the number of connections
+ that are reused, provided the keep-alive-timeout option
+ is also enabled.
+ While it also increases the number of connections problems
+ when Privoxy tries to reuse a connection that already has
+ been closed on the server side, or is closed while Privoxy
+ is trying to reuse it, this should only be a problem if it
+ happens for the first request sent by the client. If it happens
+ for requests on reused client connections, Privoxy will simply
+ close the connection and the client is supposed to retry the
+ request without bothering the user.
+ Enabling this option is therefore only recommended if the
+ connection-sharing option
+ is disabled.
+ It is an error to specify a value larger than the keep-alive-timeout value.
+ This option has no effect if Privoxy
+ has been compiled without keep-alive support.
+ default-server-timeout 60
+ Whether or not outgoing connections that have been kept alive
+ should be shared between different incoming connections.
+ 0 or 1
+ None Connections are not shared.
+ This option has no effect if Privoxy
+ has been compiled without keep-alive support, or if it's disabled.
+ Note that reusing connections doesn't necessary cause speedups.
+ There are also a few privacy implications you should be aware of.
+ If this option is effective, outgoing connections are shared between
+ clients (if there are more than one) and closing the browser that initiated
+ the outgoing connection does no longer affect the connection between Privoxy
+ and the server unless the client's request hasn't been completed yet.
+ If the outgoing connection is idle, it will not be closed until either
+ Privoxy's or the server's timeout is reached.
+ While it's open, the server knows that the system running Privoxy is still
+ there.
+ If there are more than one client (maybe even belonging to multiple users),
+ they will be able to reuse each others connections. This is potentially
+ dangerous in case of authentication schemes like NTLM where only the
+ connection is authenticated, instead of requiring authentication for
+ each request.
+ If there is only a single client, and if said client can keep connections
+ alive on its own, enabling this option has next to no effect. If the client
+ doesn't support connection keep-alive, enabling this option may make sense
+ as it allows Privoxy to keep outgoing connections alive even if the client
+ itself doesn't support it.
+ You should also be aware that enabling this option increases the likelihood
+ of getting the "No server or forwarder data" error message, especially if you
+ are using a slow connection to the Internet.
+ This option should only be used by experienced users who
+ understand the risks and can weight them against the benefits.
+ connection-sharing 1
+ Number of seconds after which a socket times out if
+ no data is received.
+ Time in seconds.
+ None A default value of 300 seconds is used.
+ The default is quite high and you probably want to reduce it.
+ If you aren't using an occasionally slow proxy like Tor, reducing
+ it to a few seconds should be fine.
+ socket-timeout 300
+ Maximum number of client connections that will be served.
+ Positive number.
+ None Connections are served until a resource limit is reached.
+ Privoxy creates one thread (or process) for every incoming client
+ connection that isn't rejected based on the access control settings.
+ If the system is powerful enough, Privoxy can theoretically deal with
+ several hundred (or thousand) connections at the same time, but some
+ operating systems enforce resource limits by shutting down offending
+ processes and their default limits may be below the ones Privoxy would
+ require under heavy load.
+ Configuring Privoxy to enforce a connection limit below the thread
+ or process limit used by the operating system makes sure this doesn't
+ happen. Simply increasing the operating system's limit would work too,
+ but if Privoxy isn't the only application running on the system,
+ you may actually want to limit the resources used by Privoxy.
+ If Privoxy is only used by a single trusted user, limiting the
+ number of client connections is probably unnecessary. If there
+ are multiple possibly untrusted users you probably still want to
+ additionally use a packet filter to limit the maximal number of
+ incoming connections per client. Otherwise a malicious user could
+ intentionally create a high number of connections to prevent other
+ users from using Privoxy.
+ Obviously using this option only makes sense if you choose a limit
+ below the one enforced by the operating system.
+ max-client-connections 256
+ The status code Privoxy returns for pages blocked with
+
+ +handle-as-empty-document.
+ 0 or 1
+ 0 Privoxy returns a status 403(forbidden) for all blocked pages.
+ Privoxy returns a status 200(OK) for pages blocked with +handle-as-empty-document
+ and a status 403(Forbidden) for all other blocked pages.
+ This is a work-around for Firefox bug 492459:
+ " Websites are no longer rendered if SSL requests for JavaScripts are blocked by a proxy.
+ "
+ (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=492459)
+ As the bug has been fixed for quite some time this option should no longer
+ be needed and will be removed in a future release. Please speak up if you
+ have a reason why the option should be kept around.
+ Whether or not buffered content is compressed before delivery.
+ 0 or 1
+ 0 Privoxy does not compress buffered content.
+ Privoxy compresses buffered content before delivering it to the client,
+ provided the client supports it.
+ This directive is only supported if Privoxy has been compiled with
+ FEATURE_COMPRESSION, which should not to be confused with FEATURE_ZLIB.
+ Compressing buffered content is mainly useful if Privoxy and the
+ client are running on different systems. If they are running on the
+ same system, enabling compression is likely to slow things down.
+ If you didn't measure otherwise, you should assume that it does
+ and keep this option disabled.
+ Privoxy will not compress buffered content below a certain length.
+ The compression level that is passed to the zlib library when compressing buffered content.
+ Positive number ranging from 0 to 9.
+ 1 Compressing the data more takes usually longer than compressing
+ it less or not compressing it at all. Which level is best depends
+ on the connection between Privoxy and the client. If you can't
+ be bothered to benchmark it for yourself, you should stick with
+ the default and keep compression disabled.
+ If compression is disabled, the compression level is irrelevant.
+ Privoxy has a number of options specific to the
+ Windows GUI interface: If "activity-animation" is set to 1, the
+ Privoxy icon will animate when
+ "Privoxy" is active. To turn off, set to 0. activity-animation 1 If "log-messages" is set to 1,
+ Privoxy will log messages to the console
+ window: log-messages 17.2.7. jarfile
7.2.8. trustfile7.2.7. trustfile
debug 1 # log each request destination (and the crunch reason if Privoxy intercepted the request)
- debug 2 # show each connection status
- debug 4 # show I/O status
- debug 8 # show header parsing
- debug 16 # log all data written to the network into the logfile
- debug 32 # debug force feature
- debug 64 # debug regular expression filters
- debug 128 # debug redirects
- debug 256 # debug GIF de-animation
- debug 512 # Common Log Format
- debug 1024 # debug kill pop-ups
- debug 2048 # CGI user interface
- debug 4096 # Startup banner and warnings.
- debug 8192 # Non-fatal errors debug 1 # Log the destination for each request Privoxy let through. See also debug 1024.
+ debug 2 # show each connection status
+ debug 4 # show I/O status
+ debug 8 # show header parsing
+ debug 16 # log all data written to the network
+ debug 32 # debug force feature
+ debug 64 # debug regular expression filters
+ debug 128 # debug redirects
+ debug 256 # debug GIF de-animation
+ debug 512 # Common Log Format
+ debug 1024 # Log the destination for requests Privoxy didn't let through, and the reason why.
+ debug 2048 # CGI user interface
+ debug 4096 # Startup banner and warnings.
+ debug 8192 # Non-fatal errors
+ debug 32768 # log all data read from the network7.3.3. hostname
src_addr[/[:port][/src_masklendst_addr[/[:port][/dst_masklendst_addr are IP addresses in dotted decimal notation or valid
- DNS names, and are IPv4 addresses in dotted decimal notation or valid
+ DNS names, port is a port
+ number, and src_masklen listen-address [::1]:8118
+ permit-access 192.0.2.0/24
permit-access [::ffff:192.0.2.0]/120
+ forward / [2001:DB8::1]:8000
7.5.2. forward-socks4 and forward-socks4a7.5.2. forward-socks4, forward-socks4a and forward-socks5target_pattern is a is a
+ URL pattern
- that specifies to which requests (i.e. URLs) this forward rule shall apply. Use that specifies to which
+ requests (i.e. URLs) this forward rule shall apply. Use / to
denote "all URLs".
- . http_parent and
+ and socks_proxy
- are IP addresses in dotted decimal notation or valid DNS names (http_parentport parameters are TCP ports, i.e. integer values from 1 to 64535
+> parameters are TCP ports,
+ i.e. integer values from 1 to 65535
forward / parent-proxy.example.org:8000
+ forward ipv6-server.example.org .
+ forward <[2-3][0-9a-f][0-9a-f][0-9a-f]:*> .
forward-socks4a / 127.0.0.1:9050 .
forward-socks5 / 127.0.0.1:9050 .7.6. Miscellaneous
7.5.5. accept-intercepted-requests7.6.1. accept-intercepted-requests
7.5.6. allow-cgi-request-crunching7.6.2. allow-cgi-request-crunching7.5.7. split-large-forms7.6.3. split-large-forms
7.6.4. keep-alive-timeout7.6. Windows GUI Options
-
- 7.6.5. default-server-timeout
7.6.6. connection-sharing
7.6.7. socket-timeout
7.6.8. max-client-connections
7.6.9. handle-as-empty-doc-returns-ok
7.6.10. enable-compression
7.6.11. compression-level
+ # Best speed (compared to the other levels)
+ compression-level 1
+ # Best compression
+ compression-level 9
+ # No compression. Only useful for testing as the added header
+ # slightly increases the amount of data that has to be sent.
+ # If your benchmark shows that using this compression level
+ # is superior to using no compression at all, the benchmark
+ # is likely to be flawed.
+ compression-level 0
+
7.7. Windows GUI Options
+
+