tinyproxy

An L4 proxy designed to act as a tiny transparent shim.

Philosophy

1. Should feel like an inet utility.
2. Be simple and effective.
3. Be performant and explicit.
4. Run in the foreground.

Configuration

Configuration is line-based:

listen <listen-proto> <listen-endpoint> <backend-proto> <backend-endpoint> [options...]

Example routes:

tinyproxy \
    -L "tcp :31232 tcp 127.0.0.1:41232" \
    -L "udp :31232 udp 127.0.0.1:41232"

Docker example:

docker run --rm ghcr.io/tgckpg/tinyproxy:v0.2.8-debian-slim \
  -L "tcp :443 tcp 10.0.1.1:443 proxy_v2,keep_alive"

Minecraft Bedrock public-to-LAN proxy

Makes a remote Minecraft Bedrock server appear as a LAN server.

tinyproxy \
    -L "udp :19132 udp 123.123.123.123:19132 broadcast_reply=listen"

Run with config file:

tinyproxy -c tinyproxy.conf

check example/tinyproxy.conf or use man 5 tinyproxy after make install-man for details

Non-goals

• TLS termination
• HTTP routing
• retries
• load balancing
• service discovery
• QUIC awareness (just forward 443 udp)
• full HAProxy compatibility

Use HAProxy, Envoy, nginx, Cilium, or a real load balancer if you need those.

Development status

Before releasing v1.0.0

I'm testing this in prod right now. This might take a long time since I'm one person.

If you found this useful and want to help please do. I really need some help on writing the man pages.

TODO

These are features that would be nice to have, but I don't need them in my Kubernetes environment.

• Config auto-reload

  • Resolution: just restart it.
  • This ensures a cleaner state. Reloading configuration is hard to handle properly.

• Health checks

  • Resolution: let Kubernetes handle them.

• Domain support

  • Resolution: use an external tool to rewrite the config and restart the proxy.
  • For my setup, I would use initContainers for this.
  • In general, when something requires hostname resolution, I usually end up using a full-featured server instead, such as HAProxy or nginx.