proxlane

One endpoint in front of every scraping API. This is the CLI.

npx proxlane --help

No install, no signup, no account. BYOK: you bring provider keys, proxlane never holds one for you.

Built for programs first

The primary caller is a script or an agent, not a person. That drives four properties, each of which is a thing that breaks machine consumption when it is missing:

• --json on every command. Not a formatting option — a contract. Pretty output is for the human running it once; JSON is what gets parsed, diffed and pasted into an issue.
• stdout is data, stderr is commentary. proxlane x --json | jq never receives a progress line on stdout, and a failure is still parseable JSON on stderr.
• No prompts, no spinners, anywhere. A prompt hangs a process with nobody to answer it; a spinner writes thousands of escape codes into a captured log.
• Exit codes are public API. Branch on them.

| Code | Meaning | |---|---| | 0 | the answer is good | | 1 | the command ran and the answer is bad — blocked, unhealthy, not OK. Not a crash. | | 2 | the invocation was wrong: unknown command, missing or bad argument | | 3 | the environment is wrong: no API key. Fix the setup, not the call. |

The 1 versus 2 split is the one that matters when automating: 1 means try something else, 2 means you called it wrong and retrying will not help.

Commands

proxlane scrape <url> --provider=<id>

One real attempt through one real adapter, and the name proxlane gives the result.

proxlane scrape https://example.com --provider=scrapingbee --json

{
  "ok": true,
  "command": "scrape",
  "data": {
    "outcome": "OK",
    "upstreamStatusCode": 200,
    "httpStatus": "upstream",
    "failover": false,
    "chargeable": true,
    "latencyMs": 1730,
    "bodyBytes": 6258,
    "cost": { "microcredits": 1000000, "source": "reported" }
  }
}

--provider is required, and that is deliberate. There is no routing yet, so nothing can choose for you — a default would imply a choice was made on your behalf. Failover, cooldowns and block detection live in the gateway; this command is one provider, one attempt, honestly labelled.

| Option | | |---|---| | --render-js | run the page's JavaScript first | | --premium=<tier> | none | residential | stealth (default none) | | --country=<cc> | ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 | | --timeout=<ms> | per-attempt budget; defaults to the provider's own ceiling | | --body | print the page as well as the verdict |

proxlane outcomes [name]

The whole error taxonomy, as data. This is the command written for an agent.

Every request resolves to exactly one outcome, and handling one correctly needs three things that are not guessable from its name: whether it fails over, whether you are charged, and what status the caller sees.

proxlane outcomes --json | jq '.data[] | select(.failover != false) | .outcome'
proxlane outcomes SOFT_BLOCK

Most outcomes cannot be provoked on demand — you cannot summon a SOFT_BLOCK — so the table is published rather than left to be discovered by trial. It is generated from the same FAILOVER table the router consults, so it cannot drift from the behaviour it documents.

proxlane providers

What each adapter can actually do, read from the registry the router filters on. Includes cost tables, timeout budgets and the env var each key is read from.

proxlane providers --json | jq '.data[] | select(.renderJs) | .id'

proxlane doctor

Diagnoses this environment. Every check prints what it checked, not just pass or fail — "Postgres: ok" is useless in an issue thread.

proxlane doctor --json    # paste this when opening an issue

Keys are reported by length only, never by value or prefix. A missing key is reported as information, not a failure: BYOK means nobody is expected to hold every provider's key, and a diagnostic that cries wolf stops being read.

Keys

Set <PROVIDER>_KEY — SCRAPERAPI_KEY, SCRAPINGBEE_KEY, SCRAPFLY_KEY. Run proxlane providers to see the exact variable for each.

A .env.local in the current directory is read if present, so keys need not live in shell history. It never overrides an already-set variable, so KEY=… proxlane … and CI secrets both still win. Note it is resolved against the working directory, not the install location.

Environment

| | | |---|---| | NO_COLOR | any value, including empty, disables colour (no-color.org) | | FORCE_COLOR | colour even when stdout is not a terminal |

Colour is off by default whenever stdout is not a TTY, so piped and captured output is plain without asking.

Licence

AGPL-3.0-only. The adapter and SDK packages are Apache-2.0 — you can write an adapter without inheriting copyleft.