Proxy setup in Guzzle (PHP)

A step-by-step guide to connecting Prokso proxies in Guzzle (PHP). It takes a few minutes.

Step 1. Get the proxy details from your dashboard

Open your plan and copy the host gw.prokso.com, port, username and password. Port 823 is HTTP and 824 is SOCKS5 (both give a new IP for every request); ports 10000–20000 keep one IP (sticky session) for up to 120 minutes and work as both HTTP and SOCKS5 (each port is a separate address). Set the country in the username: username__cr.ua.

Step 2. Install Guzzle

In the project folder run composer require guzzlehttp/guzzle.

Step 3. Set the proxy in the client options

The proxy option takes the proxy URL with the username and password. Set in the client constructor, it applies to all its requests; you can also pass it to a single request.

<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';

$client = new GuzzleHttp\Client([
    'proxy' => 'http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@gw.prokso.com:823',
    'timeout' => 30,
]);

echo $client->get('https://api.ipify.org?format=json')->getBody();

Step 4. SOCKS5 and per-protocol proxies

For SOCKS5 change the URL to socks5h://USERNAME:PASSWORD@gw.prokso.com:824 — the letter h means DNS lookups also go through the proxy. The proxy option also accepts an array with http, https and no keys if some addresses should skip the proxy.

Step 5. Check the output

Run the example: the script calls https://api.ipify.org and prints the IP the website sees. It should be the proxy's address, not yours. A 407 error means a wrong username or password. The My IP page in your browser won't help here: the browser goes direct.

Timeouts and error handling

Set both limits: connect_timeout for connecting to the proxy, and timeout for the whole request. By default Guzzle waits with no limit. Setting the http_errors option to false lets you handle the response codes yourself instead of getting exceptions:

<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';

$client = new GuzzleHttp\Client([
    'proxy' => 'http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@gw.prokso.com:823',
    'connect_timeout' => 10,
    'timeout' => 30,
    'http_errors' => false,   // handle status codes yourself
]);

$res = $client->get('https://prokso.com/ip');
echo $res->getStatusCode(), ' ', $res->getBody();

Code 407 means that the proxy did not accept the username or password, or that the plan has run out of traffic. Codes 403 and 429 come from the site. They are explained on the proxy error codes page.

Many requests at once

For parallel loading, use GuzzleHttp\Pool with the concurrency option: it limits the number of simultaneous requests. Start with 10 and raise it as long as the site responds without 429 errors. On port 823 every request goes out from a new IP.

Special characters in the username and password

The proxy address is a URL, so the @, :, and # characters in the password break its parsing. Pass the username and password through rawurlencode() before you build the string. The country is set in the username, for example USERNAME__cr.de, so you need to encode the complete, finished username.