Other configuration directives

Squid has hundreds of configuration directives to control it in various ways. It's not possible to discuss all of them here, we'll try to cover the important ones.

Setting the effective user for running Squid

Although we generally start the Squid server as root, it never runs with the privileges of the root user. Right after starting, Squid changes its real UID (User ID)/GID (Group ID) to the user determined by the directive cache_effective_user. By default, it is set to nobody. We can create a separate user for running Squid and set the value of this directive accordingly. For example, on some operating systems, Squid is run as squid user. The corresponding configuration line will be as follows:

cache_effective_user squid

Please make sure that the user specified as the value for cache_effective_user exists.

Configuring hostnames for the proxy server

Squid uses hostnames for the server for forwarding requests to other cache peers or for detecting the neighbor caches...