Your first engagement

This walks through setting up one engagement end to end. It assumes redactproxy is on your PATH; see Install if it isn’t.

Pick a folder

Work in one folder per client project. Everything below is per-folder: the engagement marker, the Claude Code settings, the CLAUDE.md note.

Warning

Don’t name the folder after the client. Claude Code puts its own working directory into a part of every request this proxy deliberately never scans, so a folder called acme-bank-pentest sends “acme bank” to the model on every single request, no matter what your rules say. Use an engagement code. This is the one leak redaction cannot close; see Known gaps.

mkdir ~/engagements/eng-2026-014
cd ~/engagements/eng-2026-014

Run the wizard

redactproxy wizard --engagement eng-2026-014

The wizard is a normal, separate invocation of the binary. It doesn’t need a running proxy, and you can re-run it at any time, including mid-session against an engagement whose proxy is already up.

It asks four things.

Names have no detectable shape, so nothing finds them automatically. This is where you list them: the legal name, the trading name, abbreviations, product names, internal codenames. One per line, blank line to move on.

Customer name variations (legal name, abbreviations, product names, one per line, blank line to move on):
> XYZCorp
> XYZ Corporation
>

These become case-insensitive substring matches, so XYZCorp also catches XYZCorporation.

2. Domains

Domains (one per line, blank line to finish):
> xyzcorp-fixture.internal
>

Give the base domain only: no www., no subdomain. Everything else resolves from it automatically, so one entry covers subdomains, email addresses at that domain, and URLs. Entries from this prompt get the structure-preserving domain treatment described in Rules, the same as rules block --domain.

Right after this prompt the wizard checks the folder you are standing in against the rules you just entered. ~/engagements/eng-2026-014 doesn’t contain any of them, so nothing is printed here and the wizard moves straight on to the next question.

If the folder were named after the client, say ~/clients/xyzcorp-pentest, its name would contain a value you just asked to have redacted, and the wizard would print this instead:

WARNING: this folder's path ("/home/you/clients/xyzcorp-pentest") currently matches your own block-list pattern "(?i)xyzcorp":
it WILL be sent unredacted on every request from here. Consider a different folder name.

That is the folder-naming problem from the top of this page, caught after the fact. Renaming the folder is the only fix; no rule can cover it. See Known gaps.

3. Which API this engagement talks to

Which API is this engagement talking to?
  1) Claude (Anthropic): uses whatever Claude Code is already signed in with
  2) z.ai
  3) Manual / another provider: writes a placeholder skeleton to edit by hand
  (currently: Claude)
> 1

Choose 1 unless you have a reason not to. redactproxy never asks for an Anthropic credential: Claude Code’s own authentication is forwarded through untouched. See Other API providers for 2 and 3.

4. Two conveniences for this folder

Add a CLAUDE.md note explaining the redaction placeholders (./CLAUDE.md)? [Y/n] y
appended the redaction-placeholder note to ./CLAUDE.md

Configure Claude Code in this folder to use the proxy automatically (writes ./.claude/settings.local.json)? [Y/n] y
wrote ./.claude/settings.local.json

Say yes to both. The first teaches Claude what the placeholder values mean so it treats them as values to reuse rather than typos to correct. The second points Claude Code at the proxy and closes several channels that bypass the proxy entirely. Both are covered in Configuring Claude Code.

If .claude/settings.local.json already exists, the wizard prints the current file, lists exactly what it would change, and asks before writing. It merges; it never overwrites.

Start the proxy

In the same folder:

redactproxy

level=INFO msg="rules loaded" disabled_count=0 block_entries=2 allow_entries=0
level=INFO msg="redactproxy listening" addr=127.0.0.1:8787 engagement=eng-2026-014 ...

redactproxy is running. This folder's Claude Code is already configured to use it
(.claude/settings.local.json), so just run `claude` here, no export needed.

Type here any time without stopping the proxy: "show", "remove <value>", "rules ...", "help".

No --engagement needed: the wizard left a .redactproxy-engagement marker in this folder and every later command run from here picks the name up from it.

Leave this terminal open. It is also a live console: see Tokens and the live console.

Start Claude Code

In a second terminal, in the same folder:

claude

That’s it. Claude Code reads ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL from this folder’s settings file and its traffic now goes through the proxy.

Without the wizard

Skipping the wizard is fine. You lose the CLAUDE.md note and the settings hardening, and have to point Claude Code at the proxy yourself:

redactproxy --engagement eng-2026-014 &
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://127.0.0.1:8787
claude

ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL only applies to the shell you set it in. Close that terminal when you’re done with the engagement, or unset it, so an unrelated session later doesn’t go through the same proxy by accident.

Check it’s working

Ask Claude something that mentions a client value and watch what comes back. Or, in the proxy’s own terminal, type:

show

That prints every mapping minted so far, real value on the left and placeholder on the right.

What next

How redaction works for what’s actually happening.
Rules: what to redact to add values mid-engagement.
Known gaps before you trust it with real client data. This is the important one.

RedactProxy Documentation