using socks proxy with postman

Question

We are trying use socks proxy for tunneling the requests through putty. It used to work in browser version of postman, as we it used to pickup chrome's proxy settings.

The standalone version of postman does not support socks proxy, it just accepts a proxy host and port and no parameters for the socks settings. Is there any way to use socks proxy with standlone postman?

Please advice.

Answer 1

The http-proxy-to-socks NodeJS client is suggested in a helpful post in the Github issue tracking Postman app support for SOCKS5 proxy.

If you have Node.js (and NPM) installed, you can install and configure http-proxy-to-socks on your system and then provide the resulting HTTP proxy values in the existing native Postman app HTTP/HTTPS proxy configuration settings.

On macOS, this simple command creates an HTTP proxy forwarding to my SOCKS proxy:

hpts -s 127.0.0.1:7941 -p 7951

In the Postman (v7.1.1 macOS) 'Proxy' section of preferences/settings, enabling the 'Global Proxy Configuration' and entering the '-p' port value from this command (as well as 'localhost') into the 'Proxy Server' inputs was successful for me.

This particular solution requires less alteration of existing settings in Postman than some other posts in that Github issue that suggest alternative workarounds where URLs have to be remapped to a specific localhost port or similar tedious changes.

Answer 2

One other option to use is a tool privoxy.

There is a blog post on how to use it with Postman: https://www.getpagespeed.com/server-setup/beyond-privoxy

In short, set the forwarding for a domain, where 127.0.0.1:8023 is the SOCKS proxy of yours. This can be done by adding the following line to /etc/privoxy/config.

forward-socks5 .domain.tld 127.0.0.1:8023 .

The default port privoxy listens on is 8118.

Finally configure Postman to use 127.0.0.1:8118 as proxy, i.e., using privoxy which forwards the requests to your SOCKS proxy.