Starting in the next curl release, 7.37.0, the curl tool supports the new command line option –proxy-header. (Completely merged at this commit.)

It works exactly like –header does, but will only include the headers in requests sent to a proxy, while the opposite is true for –header: that will only be sent in requests that will go to the end server. But of course, if you use a HTTP proxy and do a normal GET for example, curl will include headers for both the proxy and the server in the request. The bigger difference is when using CONNECT to a proxy, which then only will use proxy headers.

libcurl

For libcurl, the story is slightly different and more complicated since we’re having things backwards compatible there. The new libcurl still works exactly like the former one by default.

CURLOPT_PROXYHEADER is the new option that is the new proxy header option that should be set up exactly like CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER is

CURLOPT_HEADEROPT is then what an application uses to set how libcurl should use the two header options. Again, by default libcurl will keep working like before and use the CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER list in all HTTP requests. To change that behavior and use the new functionality instead, set CURLOPT_HEADEROPT to CURLHEADER_SEPARATE.

Then, the header lists will be handled as separate. An application can then switch back to the old behavior with a unified header list by using CURLOPT_HEADEROPT set to CURLHEADER_UNIFIED.