How To Install Squid Server on Linux Mint 20

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Squid Server on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, Squid is a web proxy caching server that offers proxy and caching services for HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and some other protocols. A proxy caching server works by acting as a gateway between server and client machines and stores frequently used content locally. By storing content locally, it reduces bandwidth while speeding up content delivery and response time.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Squid cache on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Squid Server on Linux Mint 20 Ulyana

Step 1. Before running the tutorial below, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:

sudo apt update

Step 2. Installing Squid Server on Linux Mint 20.

Now we run the following command to install the Squid proxy server:

sudo apt install squid

After the squid is installed, now start the squid service by using the following command:

sudo systemctl enable squid
sudo systemctl start squid

Step 3. Configure Squid.

Squid provides a lot of configuration. All of this configuration is stored in squid.conf a file which is located in /etc/squid. By default, the Squid proxy server listens on port 3128 for the traffic coming from client machines. However, you can configure it to listen on some different port other than the default port using the http_port directive:

sudo nano /etc/squid/squid.conf

Now replace 3128 with the port number you want the Squid proxy server to listen to, let’s say 7337:

http_port 7337

Once done, restart the Squid service to apply new rules:

sudo systemctl restart squid

Step 4. Configure Client for the Squid Proxy Server.

Let’s do a simple test of proxying with the Firefox web browser. Just go to Menu -> preferences -> Network Settings -> Settings. Check to Use this proxy server for all protocols.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Squid. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the latest version of the Squid proxy server on the Linux Mint system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Squid website.