How to Configure the Proxy Manager
Learn more about what Proxy Manager can do, how to tailor it to your needs, and how to implement popular optimized workflows.
Installation
Our Proxy Manager is easy to install and maintain on your local machine or a remote server but it is recommended to use our Cloud server to get full access to all that Proxy Manager has to offer.
Bright Data Cloud Hosting
Hosting the Proxy Manager on-premise requires load-balancing and maintenance solutions - We can host it for you!
We provide a multi-instance cloud with a single UI to control your Proxy Manager’s operations.
- To enable this option, select Activate on the Proxy Manager page in your account, and the instance will be provided automatically.
Local/Remote Installation
To install it locally/remotely on a specific OS, the minimal requirements are:
- 2GB RAM
- 1 CPU
- 3GB HDD
Installation methods for the respective OS:
Presets
Use this preset if you need full page loads. Connect from the browser manually (for example Chrome/Firefox) or programatically (for example Puppeteer/Selenium). All requests share the same IP. You can control when you refresh the IP from the UI or API.
Rules and Headers
Navigate to Rules and start building your own rules based on triggers such as:
- URL suffixes
- Status codes
- String values found in the Response body
- Requests latency
You can choose an action to be taken to each trigger respectively.
For example, an implementation of a rule to save bandwidth by nullifying media URLs’ outputs.
In addition, you can implement the desired headers in advance under the Rules section.
For example, adding the user-agent header of a Linux desktop on i686 CPU (More about user-agents can be found here)
Port Targeting
Bright Data proxy manager enables targeting the Proxy using IP:PORT format. For example, targeting a port indexed as 24000 when the proxy manager is installed locally:
If installed remotely simply switch 127.0.0.1 with the remote server IP address. (Instead of the IP:PORT USERNAME:PASSWORD)
This allows:
- Removing the username:password section from the request.
- Integration with 3rd party softwares that accept only IP:Port format
- Clean code. Ports can be configured with all necessary headers and rules in advance no need to adjust the command/request itself. More information is available here
Add External Proxies
Bright Data Proxy Manager supports external proxies from other vendors. Connecting external proxies will allow you to optimize and manage all of your proxies in one place.
- Login to your Proxy Manager
- Set a new Port.
- Select ‘External’
- Add your proxies in the next format
- Click ‘Save’ and you will have the external proxies available as one of the Proxy Manager’s port
Traffic Calculation Difference
Proxy Manager is a middleman between the request initiator and our Super Proxy servers. Proxy Manager statistics can be seen here, and Super Proxy statistics can be seen here. So each request that you send to Proxy Manager eventually reaches Super Proxy. But there could be a difference in traffic calculations, here’s why:
- Proxy Manager calculates incoming requests as they are being sent, but after they reach the Proxy Manager, it attaches additional headers, so that request’s response will have more information about the request’s flow (timeline, proxy IP, etc)
- Requests that reach the Super Proxy server from Proxy Manager are incoming with those additional parameters; that’s why Super Proxy calculates slightly bigger requests than it initially was when reached Proxy Manager
- Proxy Manager sometimes adds headers to present a better view of logs, but this data is not being calculated in the billing
In conclusion, the main source of traffic statistics should be Zones’ page since it represents statistics formulated by Super Proxy.
As a rule - Bright Data uses the Zones’ page for calculation and one source of truth
Invoices and billing events will be triggered based on the zones calculations
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