Proxied Services

A proxied service tells the agent proxy how to handle traffic to a specific external service. It lives in a folder alongside your secrets, references those secrets by key name, and defines which hosts it applies to and how each secret is placed into the outbound request.

You manage proxied services in the secrets dashboard: open a folder, click the dropdown arrow next to Add Secret, and select Add Proxied Service. They appear in the folder view next to your secrets.

Configuration

A service then applies one or more secrets in two ways, Header Rewriting and Credential Substitution. Both are independent; use either or both.

Host Patterns

A host pattern routes requests to the right service. Each pattern is a host[:port][/path], and multiple patterns can be combined with commas:

api.stripe.com                            # exact host
*.github.com                              # wildcard: matches api.github.com, not a.b.github.com
api.stripe.com:443                        # specific port
api.stripe.com/v1/*                       # path prefix
internal.corp.com:3000/api/*              # port and path
api.stripe.com, dashboard.stripe.com      # multiple patterns, matches either

A few rules to keep in mind:

• A *. wildcard matches exactly one label: *.github.com matches api.github.com but not a.b.github.com or bare github.com.
• Host matching is case-insensitive. A pattern without a port matches any port.
• Do not include a scheme (https://); patterns are hosts, not URLs.

When a request could match more than one service, the agent proxy picks the best match:

1. Exact host beats wildcard host.
2. A pattern with a specific port beats one that matches any port.
3. The longest matching path prefix wins.
4. If still tied, the service whose name sorts first alphabetically wins.

Header Rewriting

Header rewriting adds or replaces an HTTP header on the outbound request. The agent does not need to send any credential; if it sends a made-up one, the header is overwritten with the real value. This covers most APIs:

The password is optional for basic auth. Many APIs pass an API key as the username with an empty password; omitting the password produces Authorization: Basic base64(username:).

A service can rewrite multiple distinct headers (for example, an API key header plus a tenant header), but each header name can only be set by one secret. To build one header value out of several secrets, or use a secret kept elsewhere, see reusing secrets from other folders and environments.

Credential Substitution

With credential substitution, the agent is handed a dummy placeholder value and the agent proxy swaps it for the real credential wherever it appears in the request. It is useful in two situations:

• The API carries the credential somewhere other than a header. Telegram, for example, puts the bot token in the URL path: api.telegram.org/bot<token>/sendMessage.
• The agent has to see a value before it will make the call at all, headers included. Some HTTP clients validate that a credential is set, and agents often refuse to attempt a request without a real-looking key. The placeholder satisfies them, and the proxy swaps in the real value on the way out.

A few behaviors worth knowing:

• Replacement is a literal string swap of every occurrence of the placeholder in the selected surfaces.
• Request bodies are scanned up to 10 MiB; larger bodies, and bodies with a Content-Encoding (compressed payloads), are forwarded unchanged without substitution.
• WebSocket traffic is not supported; substitution applies to regular HTTP(S) requests.

Using Secrets

A proxied service uses secrets by key name, from its own folder. This keeps the relationship self-healing:

• At creation time, Infisical validates that each secret exists and that you can read its value, so typos are caught the moment you save.
• If a secret is later renamed or deleted, the proxied service skips it (the agent proxy logs a warning and the request still goes through, just without that value). Recreating the secret with the same key restores it automatically.
• Deleting the folder deletes the proxied services in it.

Reusing secrets from other folders and environments

You cannot point a proxied service at another folder directly, but you can bring an outside value into its folder so the service can use it. There are two ways, both using features that already exist in Infisical:

A folder-local secret always wins over an imported one with the same key. Read permission on an imported secret is checked where it actually lives, so an import cannot widen anyone's access.

Either way, the value is fully resolved before the proxy applies it.

Example: API Request

Proxied services can also be managed via the API. For example, creating the Telegram service described above:

curl -X POST https://app.infisical.com/api/v1/proxied-services \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $INFISICAL_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "projectId": "<project-id>",
    "environment": "prod",
    "secretPath": "/ai-agents",
    "name": "telegram-bot-api",
    "hostPattern": "api.telegram.org",
    "credentials": [
      {
        "secretKey": "TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN",
        "role": "credential-substitution",
        "placeholderKey": "TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN",
        "placeholderValue": "placeholder_tg_bot",
        "substitutionSurfaces": ["path"]
      }
    ]
  }'

Header-rewrite credentials use "role": "header-rewrite" with headerName and an optional headerPrefix, or headerPurpose (username/password) for basic auth.