Keyboard shortcuts

Press or to navigate between chapters

Press S or / to search in the book

Press ? to show this help

Press Esc to hide this help

Introduction

Proxelar is a man-in-the-middle proxy written in Rust. It intercepts, inspects, and optionally modifies HTTP and HTTPS traffic flowing between a client and a server.

What can it do?

  • Inspect traffic — see every request and response in real time, including headers and bodies
  • Intercept HTTPS — automatic CA certificate generation and per-host certificate minting
  • Modify traffic with Lua scripts — write on_request and on_response hooks to transform, block, or mock traffic at runtime
  • Forward and reverse proxy — use as a system proxy (forward) or put it in front of your service (reverse)
  • Three interfaces — interactive TUI, plain terminal output, or web GUI

Architecture

Proxelar is built as a three-crate Rust workspace:

  • proxelar-cli — the CLI binary with three interface modes
  • proxyapi — the core proxy engine, usable as a standalone library
  • proxyapi_models — shared request/response data types

The proxy engine is built on hyper 1.x, rustls 0.23, and tokio. HTTPS interception uses OpenSSL for certificate generation and rustls for TLS termination. Lua scripting is powered by mlua with a vendored Lua 5.4.