How To Install Squid Proxy on CentOS

Squid is a popular, free Linux program that allows you to create a forwarding web proxy. In this guide, you'll see how to install Squid on CentOS to turn your server into a web proxy.

Squid can be configured as a reverse proxy as well, but that type of setup is not covered in this article.

This guide was written for CentOS 6, but should also work for CentOS 7.

Step 1: Installing Squid

I'm going to assume that you have a new CentOS server. You can now install Squid with yum:

yum install squid

Step 2: Editing configuration

You can now configure Squid. The configuration file is located at the following path:

vi /etc/squid/squid.conf

Open this file with your favorite text editor in order to configure Squid settings. You can find an overview of them on the official Squid website.

Step 3: Open port in firewall

Now open the Squid port in the firewall. The default port is 3128 . If you changed it, naturally, open the port you set Squid to run on:

iptables -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 3128 -j ACCEPT

Step 3: Restarting service

You can now restart the Squid service:

service squid restart

To make Squid start every time you start your server, use chkconfig:

chkconfig squid on

In order to see your users' activity, you can use the tail command to read the logs:

tail -f /var/log/squid/access.log

Step 4:

You can now configure other computers to send their traffic through your Squid proxy. If you would like to do this on OS X, Windows, or Linux, follow this guide.