How to Use Proxies With Postman: Settings, SOCKS5 and Newman

Postman keeps every proxy option in one place: Settings, on the Proxy tab. The desktop app starts out with your computer's own proxy, which Postman's docs call the default proxy. Below it sit two switches for sending requests: Use system proxy and Use custom proxy configuration. A custom proxy takes a protocol, a host, a port, a login and a bypass list. Since version 11.56.4, which Postman announced on August 1, 2025, that protocol can also be SOCKS.

Two rules from Postman's own pages explain most proxy trouble. When both switches are on, Postman uses the custom proxy. When proxy variables such as HTTPS_PROXY are set in your operating system, Postman "will use the system proxy and ignore the proxy settings in Postman". The steps below come from Postman Docs Latest (v12), checked line by line against v11. Newman's part comes from its own README and the code under it. We read all of it on October 13, 2026, and sent nothing through a proxy.

Where is the proxy setting in Postman?

Click the settings icon in Postman's header, choose Settings, then open the Proxy tab. The tab has two parts. The first is the default proxy, the one your computer already uses. The second, "Proxy configurations for sending requests", holds the system proxy and the custom proxy.

A login for your computer's proxy

If your network's proxy asks for a password, Postman's docs put the login under the default proxy. Under "Default proxy configuration", select the checkbox next to "This proxy requires authentication". Enter the Username and Password the proxy needs, then click "Save and Restart Postman". The web app has no default proxy setting. There, Postman's note points you to the system proxy or a custom proxy.

The system proxy

Under "Proxy configurations for sending requests", turn on the toggle next to "Use system proxy". Postman then sends requests through the proxy set in your operating system, which can be "an HTTP or SOCKS proxy". A second, optional toggle tells Postman to read the operating system's HTTP_PROXY, HTTPS_PROXY and NO_PROXY variables. You set these in your operating system, outside Postman.

Postman's troubleshooting section shows where the system proxy lives. On Windows it names Settings, Network & Internet, Proxy, then Manual proxy setup. For macOS it names System Preferences, Advanced and the Proxies tab. Apple's current Mac User Guide reaches the same list through System Settings: pick the network service, then "click Details, then click Proxies". Our guide on turning a proxy off shows the switch on each system.

A custom proxy

A custom proxy sends Postman's requests through a proxy you name, separate from the one your computer uses.

The proxy applies to the whole app. Postman's proxy page lists every option under Settings and describes no proxy per request or per collection. In 2025 a user asked in Postman's issue tracker to switch the proxy per collection. A Postman team member replied that proxy and certificate management "could be better".

Which proxy does a request use?

Postman's pages give three rules, and together they explain most proxies that seem to be ignored.

• Both switches on. "If both the system proxy and custom proxy options are enabled, Postman will use the custom proxy".
• Proxy variables in your operating system. In that case Postman uses the system proxy, and the proxy you typed into Postman has no effect.
• A host on the bypass list. Requests to that host skip the custom proxy, as the Proxy bypass field describes.

The desktop app needs no agent. In the web app, an agent sends the requests, and Postman offers four: the Desktop Agent, the Cloud Agent, the Interceptor Agent and the Browser Agent. The Desktop Agent routes requests through your own computer and network. The Cloud Agent sends them from Postman's cloud servers, so it cannot reach private or local resources on your network.

SOCKS proxies in Postman

Postman added SOCKS in version 11.56.4. A Postman team member announced it on August 1, 2025, in issue 1321 of Postman's public issue tracker. That issue, titled SOCKS5, had been open since August 5, 2015. It closed the day of the announcement, with 75 comments and 131 reactions. To see your own version, open Settings, then About.

The limits come from the same pages. Postman's docs say it "only supports sending HTTP and HTTPS requests through a SOCKS proxy". The announcement named WebSocket, MQTT and MCP as request types Postman was "evaluating" for SOCKS. Fourteen months later, by our count, the v12 docs still list HTTP and HTTPS only.

Pick the version your proxy speaks. With SOCKS5, the hostname is looked up on your side. With SOCKS5H, the proxy looks it up. The Postman team member wrote that socks5h:// "sends the hostname to the proxy server, so there is no DNS resolution done by the client". The user who had asked replied that DNS worked with it. The README of postman-request, the request library Newman depends on, draws the same line. It gives socks4a and socks5h "proxy-side hostname resolution" and calls socks4 "IPv4 only, no authentication". Our page on SOCKS4 vs SOCKS5 explains who resolves names in each.

Answers written before August 2025 describe bridges that turn a SOCKS proxy into an HTTP one, because Postman had no SOCKS option then. One proxy guide we read still tells readers to find a workaround for SOCKS5. Another, dated June 2026, leaves the question open. Our free proxy list API returns SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 proxies next to HTTP ones, in one call with no key. A public proxy is run by whoever runs it, so keep API keys and logins out of requests you send through one.

Proxy logins and the 407 error

A 407 comes from the proxy. RFC 9110 says it means the client must "authenticate itself in order to use a proxy for this request". The proxy must also send a Proxy-Authenticate header with a challenge, which names the scheme it wants.

In Postman the 407 often reads "tunneling socket could not be established, statusCode=407". A Stack Overflow question with that title, asked on July 6, 2017, had 262,803 views on October 13, 2026. The wording matches an error in @postman/tunnel-agent, a module that Postman's request library depends on. It asks the proxy for a tunnel with a CONNECT request, the method RFC 9110 defines for tunnels. Any answer other than 200 becomes that error, with the proxy's status code at the end.

Postman's docs and the best-voted answers point to three fixes.

• The proxy wants a login. For a custom proxy, turn on Proxy auth and enter the login. For your computer's own proxy, select "This proxy requires authentication" under the default proxy. A 2021 answer from a corporate network did exactly that with the user's Windows login, with both switches off.
• You need no proxy at all. Postman's docs say to turn both switches off. The answer with the most votes, 80, did the same.
• Proxy variables are set. Another answer turned off the option that respects HTTP_PROXY, HTTPS_PROXY and NO_PROXY. Postman's own fix is to remove those variables, or to start Postman without them.

Postman's docs describe its proxy login as basic authentication. If the Proxy-Authenticate header names another scheme, they do not say what Postman does. Our page on the 407 error covers its causes across tools. To learn whether Postman or the proxy is at fault, try the same proxy and login in curl, as our curl guide shows.

Starting Postman without proxy variables

Postman's docs give a small file for this. It opens the app "without any of the proxy environment variables set". The Windows version is postman.bat.

set HTTP_PROXY=''
set HTTPS_PROXY=''
set http_proxy=''
set https_proxy=''
start C:\path\to\Postman.exe

On macOS and Linux, a postman.sh does the same job before it starts /path/to/postman. One detail in the Windows file needs care. Microsoft's reference for the set command says it "assigns everything that follows the equal sign (=) to the value of the variable". By that rule, set HTTP_PROXY='' gives the variable two apostrophes as its value. Microsoft adds that a variable followed by the equal sign alone is cleared. A 2019 Stack Overflow answer wrote its batch file that way, as set HTTP_PROXY= with nothing after the sign.

When Postman cannot reach localhost

A proxy also catches requests meant for your own machine. In a 2018 Stack Overflow question with 240,723 views, a user on Postman for Linux 6.0.9 sat behind a company proxy. Every call to localhost came back as "an error page from the proxy server". The accepted answer started Postman with NO_PROXY=localhost,127.0.0.1.

Postman now documents two places for such exceptions. With a custom proxy, put the hosts in Proxy bypass. With the system proxy, turn on the optional toggle for the operating system's variables and list the hosts in NO_PROXY. The postman-request README explains that variable: hosts separated by commas, an optional port such as google.com:443, and * to ignore the proxy variables entirely.

Could not get any response, and certificate errors

Postman once showed a page titled "Could not get any response", with "Proxy configured incorrectly" among its reasons. A question quoting that page, asked in December 2017, had 497,757 views. Its accepted answer, with 574 votes, switched off SSL certificate verification and both proxy options, and set the request timeout to 0.

When the error names a certificate, Postman's docs offer a fix that keeps verification on. An endpoint whose certificate comes from an internal registry makes requests fail with "SSL Error: Self signed certificate". Add that CA under Settings, Certificates: turn on the "CA certificates" toggle and select the "PEM file". In the web app, certificates need the Desktop Agent.

Newman and the Postman CLI

Newman runs Postman collections from the command line, and it takes its proxy from the environment. Its README lists HTTP_PROXY / http_proxy, HTTPS_PROXY / https_proxy and NO_PROXY / no_proxy. Set them in the shell before newman run. Version 6.2.3 was the latest on npm on October 13, 2026.

The details live in postman-request, the library Newman's README points to. HTTP_PROXY is used for requests without SSL and HTTPS_PROXY for SSL requests, unless a request sets its own proxy. NO_PROXY works as described in the localhost section above.

For SOCKS, Newman's README offers one route, and only when Newman runs as a library: pass a custom agent as requestAgents. Its example, word for word:

const newman = require('newman');
const SocksProxyAgent = require('socks-proxy-agent');
const requestAgent = new SocksProxyAgent({ host: 'localhost', port: '1080' });

newman.run({
    collection: require('./sample-collection.json'),
    requestAgents: {
        http: requestAgent, // agent used for HTTP requests
        https: requestAgent, // agent used for HTTPS requests
    }
}, function (err) {
    if (err) { throw err; }
    console.log('collection run complete!');
});

The socks-proxy-agent package looks different today. Its current README imports the class by name, as import { SocksProxyAgent } from 'socks-proxy-agent';, and passes the constructor a socks:// address. Version 10.1.0, the latest on npm, is an ES module and needs Node 20 or newer, by its package metadata. Match those two lines of the example to the version you install.

Could a socks5:// address in HTTPS_PROXY do the same job? The postman-request README documents SOCKS addresses, and its latest release, 2.88.1-postman.49, depends on socks-proxy-agent. Newman 6.2.3 pins postman-runtime 7.39.1, which pins postman-request 2.88.1-postman.34. That older version lists no SOCKS package among its dependencies. We ran nothing to test it, so the README's library route is the documented one.

The Postman CLI is a separate tool from Newman. We read eight pages about the two on learning.postman.com. The pages for postman collection run and postman request list six certificate options, such as --ssl-extra-ca-certs and --insecure. None of the eight pages mentions a proxy.

Postman as a proxy: capturing traffic

"Postman proxy" can also mean the reverse, with Postman as the proxy. Its docs describe a built-in proxy that captures HTTP and HTTPS traffic from another client, such as a phone app. Postman's guide for it covers macOS from v10.17 and Windows from v10.18. Linux and older versions have a separate guide. To capture HTTPS from a phone, install the Postman security certificate on that phone. Postman Interceptor, a browser extension, captures requests sent from a web browser.

Check that the proxy is in use

Postman's Console lists "The proxy configuration and certificates used for the request". Open it with Console in Postman's footer, send the request, and expand it. To test the proxy itself, use the free app on our proxy checker page. It checks a proxy from your own connection and shows the fraud score of its exit. Our guide on how to check if a proxy is working covers speed, country and anonymity. For scripts outside Postman, our Node.js guide measures which clients read HTTP_PROXY.

Where HProxy fits

Postman's custom proxy takes an HTTP or SOCKS proxy with a basic login. Our residential proxies start at $0.44 per GB. Premium adds city and ISP targeting and sticky sessions up to 24 hours, from $1.00 per GB. Datacenter proxies, from $1.58 per IP, take HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5 connections, which covers both kinds Postman offers. For a quick test first, the free proxy list API returns every working public proxy we have. When testing turns into collecting data, our page on proxies for web scraping covers which type fits which job.

What we could not find out

• Which agents use the proxy settings in the web app. Postman's proxy page mentions the web app only to say its default proxy cannot be set there. The agent page lists four agents and says nothing about proxies.
• What happens with both switches off. The proxy page says the desktop app uses the system's proxy by default. Its troubleshooting section turns both switches off when your network needs no proxy. We found no line that says which applies to API requests.
• Proxy logins beyond Basic. Postman's docs describe proxy authentication as basic authentication only.
• A proxy option for the Postman CLI. None in the eight pages we read.
• SOCKS through Newman's variables. Newman's README says nothing on it, and the postman-request that Newman 6.2.3 pins lists no SOCKS package. We ran nothing.
• Postman variables in the proxy fields. One proxy guide suggests keeping proxy details in Postman environment variables. Postman's proxy page does not say its fields accept them.
• The two apostrophes. We did not find whether Postman reads the value '' from its own sample batch file as an empty proxy.
• Postman's release notes. The text our reader took from that page held no sentence about SOCKS or proxies. The date of version 11.56.4 rests on the announcement in issue 1321.

Sources

All read on October 13, 2026.

• Postman Docs, Configure Postman to use a proxy server, Latest (v12), and the v11 page.
• Postman Docs, About the Postman Agent.
• Postman Docs, Debug API requests, and Add and manage CA and client certificates.
• Postman Docs, Capture HTTP traffic and sync cookies.
• Postman Docs, the Postman CLI pages on options, authentication, collection runs, troubleshooting, the collection commands and the request command, and two Newman pages.
• GitHub, postmanlabs/postman-app-support issue 1321, SOCKS5, with its 75 comments.
• Newman README, Configuring Proxy and Using Socks Proxy; the npm registry entry for newman 6.2.3.
• postman-request README, SOCKS proxies and the proxy variables; npm registry entries for postman-request 2.88.1-postman.34 and 2.88.1-postman.49, and postman-runtime 7.39.1.
• @postman/tunnel-agent 0.6.8, index.js, read through unpkg.com.
• socks-proxy-agent README, and its npm registry entry for version 10.1.0.
• RFC 9110, HTTP Semantics, sections 9.3.6, 11.7.1 and 15.5.8.
• Microsoft Learn, set (environment variable).
• Apple, Change proxy settings on Mac.
• Stack Overflow questions 47806876, 44945663, 49130558, 41366909 and 47296837 with their answers, read through the Stack Exchange API.
• Google Keyword Planner, worldwide monthly volumes, and Search Console figures for this page from July 15 to October 12, 2026.