SOCKS5 Proxies

What a SOCKS5 proxy does

SOCKS5 is a general-purpose proxy protocol. Unlike an HTTP proxy, which understands web requests, a SOCKS5 proxy simply relays your connection to the destination. That is why it works with far more than browsers: scrapers, email clients, messengers, game launchers, SSH and FTP tools can all be pointed at it.

SOCKS5 supports username and password authentication and can carry UDP traffic as well as TCP, if the proxy server allows it. Our static ISP proxies list UDP support; for other proxy types check your use case with support before you rely on UDP.

When to choose SOCKS5 over HTTP

• Your tool is not a web browser or HTTP client, for example a messenger, a trading app or a custom TCP service.
• You want the proxy to resolve DNS for you, so hostnames are not looked up on your own network.
• You prefer one protocol for everything instead of switching between HTTP and HTTPS proxies.

For plain web scraping with libraries such as requests or curl, HTTP works just as well. The comparison in our guide SOCKS5 vs HTTP proxy goes through the differences in detail.

Use a SOCKS5 proxy in two commands

Replace the placeholders with the values from your dashboard. The socks5h scheme tells the client to resolve hostnames through the proxy.

curl --proxy socks5h://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT https://api.ipify.org

pip install "requests[socks]"
python -c "import requests; p='socks5h://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT'; print(requests.get('https://api.ipify.org', proxies={'http':p,'https':p}).text)"

Both commands print the exit IP. You can also check it with the free proxy checker.

SOCKS5 proxy types at Flexyproxies