Integrating Proxies with Puppeteer & Playwright

Headless browsers like Puppeteer and Playwright are essential for scraping JavaScript-heavy sites and solving interactive challenges. Routing them through proxies takes a few lines — here's the exact setup for both.

Puppeteer with an authenticated proxy

Pass the proxy at launch, then authenticate before navigating:

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
    args: ['--proxy-server=http://gateway.trustproxy.io:8000'],
  });
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.authenticate({ username: 'user', password: 'pass' });

  await page.goto('https://example.com', { waitUntil: 'networkidle2' });
  console.log(await page.title());
  await browser.close();
})();

Playwright with a proxy

Playwright takes the proxy directly in launch options, credentials included:

const { chromium } = require('playwright');

(async () => {
  const browser = await chromium.launch({
    proxy: {
      server: 'http://gateway.trustproxy.io:8000',
      username: 'user',
      password: 'pass',
    },
  });
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto('https://example.com');
  console.log(await page.title());
  await browser.close();
})();

Rotating IPs across sessions

With a rotating residential endpoint every new browser context can exit from a fresh IP automatically — just relaunch or create a new context per task. For per-account isolation instead, give each context its own static residential IP.

Tips for reliability

• Set a realistic User-Agent and viewport so the browser fingerprint looks human.
• Use waitUntil conditions so pages fully load before you scrape.
• Reuse a context to preserve cookies through multi-step flows.
• Pair this with high-trust IPs to get past protections — see the Cloudflare bypass guide.

SOCKS5 or HTTP?

Both work with headless browsers. If you're unsure which to pick, read SOCKS5 vs HTTP proxies.