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Quickstart

This guide gets a request flowing through the proxy. You’ll need an API key (create one in the dashboard). A key is a single secret, shown once at creation.

1. Point your client at the proxy

Section titled “1. Point your client at the proxy”

bytetourist speaks the standard HTTP proxy protocol, so any HTTP client works. The proxy listens on :8080 by default.

Terminal window
curl -x http://dev.bytetourist.com:8080 \
  -U "YOUR_API_KEY:" \
  https://api.ipify.org?format=json

-x sets the proxy; -U sends the API key as the Proxy-Authorization username, with no password. The response comes back from one of your edge nodes’ IPs.

2. Target a country and IP type

Section titled “2. Target a country and IP type”

Encode targeting directly in the proxy username as - separated param-value pairs after your API key:

Terminal window
curl -x http://dev.bytetourist.com:8080 \
  -U "YOUR_API_KEY-cc-de-iptype-residential:" \
  https://api.ipify.org?format=json

That routes through a residential IP in Germany (cc-de). See all params in the reference.

3. Choose a routing strategy

Section titled “3. Choose a routing strategy”

Add strategy-<name> to control how the node is picked. freshest_ip always uses the least-recently-used IP for this (org, host) pair:

Terminal window
curl -x http://dev.bytetourist.com:8080 \
  -U "YOUR_API_KEY-cc-de-iptype-residential-strategy-freshest_ip:" \
  https://api.ipify.org?format=json

Prefer headers?

Section titled “Prefer headers?”

If you can’t put params in the username, send X-Proxy-* headers instead — they take precedence over username-encoded values:

Terminal window
curl -x http://dev.bytetourist.com:8080 \
  -U "YOUR_API_KEY:" \
  -H "X-Proxy-Country: de" \
  -H "X-Proxy-IPType: residential" \
  -H "X-Proxy-Strategy: freshest_ip" \
  https://api.ipify.org?format=json

All X-Proxy-* headers are stripped before the request leaves your node.

HTTPS targets

Section titled “HTTPS targets”

HTTPS works transparently over CONNECT. The same proxy URL and credentials apply — no extra flags:

Terminal window
curl -x http://dev.bytetourist.com:8080 \
  -U "YOUR_API_KEY-cc-de:" \
  https://example.com

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”