Playwright proxy

Why a residential Playwright proxy

Playwright already executes JavaScript and presents a real Chromium TLS fingerprint. That does not change the ASN of the machine it runs on. A GitHub runner, an AWS box, or a Hetzner VPS still looks like a datacenter to Cloudflare and DataDome. A residential proxy substitutes an ISP-assigned household exit so the destination scores the session as a consumer visit. Aethyn puts country, optional city/ISP (Elite), and sticky session on the username, so one credential set covers a single-identity scrape and a pool of isolated contexts. Rotation is a new context, not a mutated live one. Per-context proxies on Chromium are ignored unless you pass a placeholder proxy at launch — that gotcha, plus geo-matching and bandwidth aborts, is in the long guide rather than duplicated here.

Setup steps

1. 1Install Playwright: pip install playwright (or npm i playwright).
2. 2Pass a proxy object with server, username, and password — never user:pass@host.
3. 3For many identities, launch Chromium with proxy: { server: 'per-context' }, then set the real proxy on each newContext().
4. 4Put targeting suffixes (-country-, -session-, -lifetime-) in the username field.

Code

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

with sync_playwright() as p:
    # Chromium ignores context proxies unless launch() already has one.
    browser = p.chromium.launch(proxy={"server": "per-context"})
    context = browser.new_context(proxy={
        "server": "http://proxy.aethyn.io:2099",
        "username": "aethyn-XXXXX-country-us",
        "password": "PASSWORD",
    })
    page = context.new_page()
    page.goto("https://httpbin.org/ip")
    print(page.content())
    context.close()
    browser.close()

import { chromium } from "playwright";

const browser = await chromium.launch({
  proxy: {
    server: "http://proxy.aethyn.io:2099",
    username: "aethyn-XXXXX-country-us",
    password: "PASSWORD",
  },
});
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto("https://httpbin.org/ip");
console.log(await page.content());
await browser.close();

Replace aethyn-XXXXX and PASSWORD with your dashboard credentials. See the full targeting reference and protocol/port list. Or use the official proxy-builder-sdk to build targeting strings without hand-assembling usernames.

Troubleshooting

The failure that looks like “the proxy is broken” is almost always credentials in the URL or a context proxy that Chromium ignored. Put username and password in the fields, never in server. To run many identities in one process, launch with proxy: { server: 'per-context' }, then set the real Aethyn gateway on each newContext(). If you launched with no proxy at all, every context-level proxy is a silent no-op. 407 means auth; net::ERR_TUNNEL_CONNECTION_FAILED usually means the wrong port (Premium HTTP 2099, Elite HTTP 5499, SOCKS5 1099/3499). A 200 with empty or challenge HTML is a soft block — see Playwright silent 403. Full setup, sticky TTL (1–1440 minutes), and locale matching: /blog/playwright-residential-proxies-2026.

Playwright proxy FAQ