“This is a SOCKS Proxy, Not An HTTP Proxy”

Question

As the title says, I've been trying to use Tor as a proxy for Postman and I'm getting the following response when I try to make a request to a specific endpoint that does not support HTTPS

This is a SOCKS Proxy, Not An HTTP Proxy

This is a SOCKs proxy, not an HTTP proxy.

It appears you have configured your web browser to use this Tor port as an HTTP proxy.

This is not correct: This port is configured as a SOCKS proxy, not an HTTP proxy. If you need an HTTP proxy tunnel, use the HTTPTunnelPort configuration option in place of, or in addition to, SOCKSPort. Please configure your client accordingly.

See https://www.torproject.org/documentation.html for more information.

But the thing is, when I use the Tor browser, I can visit the same site just fine.

So what is the browser doing different than my "tor.exe" proxy? Are there any ways around this?

Answer 1

Tor provides a SOCKS proxy by default.

Whatever you've configured to use Tor is trying to use it as an HTTP proxy which is a different kind of proxy protocol.

Tor (at least as of 0.3.2.x) can provide an HTTPTunnelPort which provides an HTTP CONNECT proxy interface. If the application is capable of using an HTTP connect proxy (instead of a transparent HTTP proxy) then you should be able to configure Tor by running, for example, tor.exe --HTTPTunnelPort 8118 from the command line, which would give you an HTTP CONNECT proxy on port 8118.

If applications cannot support HTTP CONNECT or SOCKS then they will not be able to use Tor without using Transparent Proxying to force internet connections to use Tor.

Answer 2

As @cacahuatl said you can use that switch, if you want it to be permanent go to /etc/tor/torrc (This is the path for tor config file in Ubuntu and Debian), open it with your favorite text editor and add HTTPTunnelPort 9080 at the end of the file, reset tor service with this command:

sudo service tor restart

and you're done.

Answer 3

Tor was not designed to be an HTTP/HTTPS proxy. An answer to a similar question is provided here.

But the thing is, when I use the Tor browser, I can visit the same site just fine.

Well, the Tor browser uses a different port (9150) than the standalone Tor program (9050). They each have their own configuration files, so you probably didn't touch the Tor browser's configuration (I don't recommend doing so).

If you really need a good HTTPS proxy, why don't you try hide.me? It's a free VPN and you can subscribe for free to get a 2GB download cap good for 30 days. After your subscription expires, you keep subscribing again (also for free) and get all of that again.