Polipo
| Developer(s) | Juliusz Chroboczek · Christopher Davis |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 1.0.4.1 / February 2, 2010 |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Type | web cache, proxy server |
| License | MIT License [1] |
| Website | www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/polipo/ |
Polipo is a lightweight forwarding and caching proxy server.
Polipo is an HTTP 1.1-compliant web proxy supporting IPv4, IPv6, traffic filtering and privacy-enhancement. To minimize latency, Polipo both pipelines multiple resource requests and multiplexes multiple transactions onto the same TCP/IP connection.[1]
Polipo is free software[2] "and comes with absolutely no strings attached".[3] It runs on GNU/Linux, OpenWrt, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD. Almost any Web browser can use it.
Contents |
[edit] Design
Polipo is designed to be used as a personal web cache or a web cache shared among a few users to boost internet access.[4][5] Designed to be fast, lightweight and small, it is useful when the system resources for a larger proxy are unavailable. Because of this reason, it has been put to uses such as a tether on the OpenWrt.
[edit] Features
The fast, lightweight and small memory footprint proxy server polipo uses a variety of techniques[2]:
- Polipo will upgrade client requests to HTTP/1.1 even if they come in as old HTTP/1.0.
- Polipo will make web browsing faster or at least appear to be of less latency.
- Polipo will cache the initial segment of a download and can complete it later using Range requests, in case of interrupts.
- Polipo can substitute filtering, privacy-enhancing proxies such as Privoxy or WWWOFFLE, but please note that, unlike Privoxy, it does not perform application-layer anonimisation by default and, while it is possible to configure Polipo to perform some sanitisation of HTTP headers, this does not come even close to the amount of munging that Privoxy can do.[6]
- Polipo has complete support for IPv6.
- Since Polipo can speak both IPv4 and IPv6, Polipo can be used as a bridge between the IPv4 and IPv6 Internets.
- Polipo acts as a content-filtering by means to deny access to URLs specified in a blacklist.
- Polipo acts as a privacy-enhancing web proxy server which provides control over the content that may be relayed through the proxy.
censoredHeaders = OPTION1,OPTION2,OPTION3,... censorReferer = true|false|maybe
- Polipo can speak the SOCKS 4 & SOCKS 5 protocols.
- Polipo does HTTP 1.1 pipelining well, so it can enhance internet communication latency.
- Polipo serves as a web cache.
[edit] Polipo and the anonymising proxy server TOR
Polipo can speak the SOCKS 4 & SOCKS 5 protocols and therefore is recommended to be used together with the TOR anonymising network. Polipo is a web proxy that does HTTP 1.1 pipelining well, so it can enhance TOR's communication latency or lag.[7][8] Polipo and Tor are available bundled together.[9]
[edit] See also
- Web accelerator which discusses host-based HTTP acceleration
- Proxy server which discusses client-side proxies
- Reverse proxy which discusses origin-side proxies
- Comparison of web servers
- Comparison of lightweight web servers
- Internet Cache Protocol
[edit] References
- ^ "rfc2068 - HTTP/1.1". http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2068. Retrieved 2010-09-23.
- ^ a b "Polipo — a caching web proxy". http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/polipo/. Retrieved 2010-02-05.
- ^ "Polipo distribution conditions". http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/polipo/COPYING.text. Retrieved 2010-09-23.
- ^ "Boost your Internet browsing - Install Polipo". http://www.go2linux.org/boost-your-internet-browsing-polipo-personal-proxy. Retrieved 2010-02-05.
- ^ "The Polipo Manual". http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/polipo/polipo.html#Privoxy. Retrieved 2010-09-23.
- ^ "Using tor with Polipo". http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/polipo/tor.html. Retrieved 2012-12-27.
- ^ "Torproject.org FAQ - Why do we need Polipo or Privoxy with Tor? Which is better?". https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#WhydoweneedPolipoorPrivoxywithTorWhichisbetter. Retrieved 2010-12-28.
- ^ "Ubuntuusers.de - Tor einrichten und verwenden.". http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Tor/Installation. Retrieved 2010-12-28.
- ^ "Running the Tor client on Microsoft Windows". https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-windows.html.en. Retrieved 2012-02-11.
