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Client

This tutorial will guide you through the setup of a Hysteria client. Similar to the server, Hysteria is very flexible and the options covered in this tutorial are only a subset of what's available. We will focus on the HTTP and SOCKS5 proxy modes. For further customization, please refer to Full Client Config.

The steps were performed in a Linux environment, but should be similar on other platforms.

Prerequisites

  • A Hysteria server you can connect to

Creating configuration file

Assuming you have already downloaded the executable for your platform into a directory, say hysteria-linux-amd64-avx. Create a config.yaml file in the same directory.

Note: Some values may conflict with YAML syntax. For instance, IPv6 addresses with ports, such as [2001:db8::1]:443, can cause the configuration file to fail to parse. To work around such problems, simply enclose the value in "" like this: "[2001:db8::1]:443".

Be sure to replace the values according to your server's settings and your specific needs.

server: your.domain.net:443 # (1)!

auth: Se7RAuFZ8Lzg # (2)!

bandwidth: # (3)!
  up: 20 mbps
  down: 100 mbps

socks5:
  listen: 127.0.0.1:1080 # (4)!

http:
  listen: 127.0.0.1:8080 # (5)!
  1. Replace with your server's address
  2. Replace with the password you set on the server
  3. See below for more information on bandwidth
  4. Replace with the address you want the SOCKS5 proxy to listen on
  5. Replace with the address you want the HTTP proxy to listen on

Bandwidth

Hysteria has two built-in congestion control algorithms (BBR & Brutal). Which one to use depends on whether bandwidth information is provided. If you want to use BBR instead of Brutal, you can delete the entire bandwidth section. For more details, see Bandwidth behavior explained

⚠️ Warning Higher bandwidth values are not always better; be very careful not to exceed the maximum bandwidth that your current network can support. Doing so will backfire, causing network congestion and unstable connections.

TLS

If your server uses a self-signed certificate, you can either specify the CA to trust in the configuration file, or use the insecure option to disable verification altogether. If you choose the insecure setting, we strongly recommend using the pinSHA256 option to verify the server's certificate fingerprint.

tls:
  ca: ca.crt # (1)!
  1. Replace with the path to the CA certificate file
tls:
  insecure: true

WARNING: Using insecure alone is NOT recommended, as it makes your connection susceptible to MITM attacks. See the next tab for a better alternative.

tls:
  insecure: true
  pinSHA256: BA:88:45:17:A1... # (1)!
  1. You can obtain the fingerprint of your certificate using openssl: openssl x509 -noout -fingerprint -sha256 -in your_cert.crt

Running the client

Start the client by the following command:

./hysteria-linux-amd64-avx

./hysteria-linux-amd64-avx -c whatever.yaml

TIP: You can also use ./hysteria-linux-amd64-avx client, but client is the default mode so it can be omitted.

Windows users: You can launch the client directly by double-clicking the exe file, assuming you have placed the configuration file in the same directory and named it config.yaml.

If you see the log message "connected to server" and no errors, congratulations 🎉! You have successfully deployed a Hysteria client.

You will also see a log message "use this URI to share your server" with a URI. This URI can be used as the server value in the client's configuration file. Since it already contains the password and a few other settings, you won't need to specify them separately. For more information on the URI format, please refer to URI Scheme.

This tutorial won't cover the details of how to use an HTTP or SOCKS5 proxy, as there are plenty of resources available online. For those completely new to proxies, we recommend the Proxy SwitchyOmega browser extension for Chrome and Firefox as a good starting point.