How to use proxies with NodeJS axios?

by scrapecrow May 16, 2023

Javascript's axios is a popular HTTP client often used when web scraping with nodejs.
To use proxies with axios we can use the proxy parameter in get and postj methods:

const axios = require('axios');
axios.get('https://httpbin.dev/ip', {
  proxy: {
    host: "160.11.12.13",
    port: "8080",
    auth: {
      username: "username",
      password: "password",
    }
  }
})
.then((response) => {
  console.log(response.data);
})
.catch((error) => {
  console.error(error);
});

Note that axios does not support automatic proxy use through terminal environment variables HTTP_PROXY, HTTPS_PROXY or ALL_PROXY.

Axios also does not support SOCKS proxies directly but it can be enabled through socks-proxy-agent library:

const axios = require('axios');
const SocksProxyAgent = require('socks-proxy-agent');

const proxy = 'socks5://localhost:1080';

const httpAgent = new SocksProxyAgent(proxy);
const httpsAgent = new SocksProxyAgent(proxy);

axios.get('http://example.com', {
  httpAgent,
  httpsAgent,
})
.then((response) => {
  console.log(response.data);
})
.catch((error) => {
  console.error(error);
});