WS Proxy

Simple container with SOCKS5 proxy running behind sockify to connect from WebAssembly.

Minimal example with a public proxy server

Open the WebR test app run some code to test. Note how the ALL_PROXY variable is all that is needed to make libcurl route all traffic via the proxy server.

# Install packages
install.packages("curl")

# Make a request via the public server server!
Sys.setenv(ALL_PROXY="socks5h://test:[email protected]:443")
req <- curl::curl_fetch_memory('https://hb.cran.dev/get')
cat(rawToChar(req$content))

The server ws.r-universe.dev is running exactly the same service from this container, but behind cloudflare to improve routing and handle the HTTPS certificates.

Testing many requests in parallel

The following code downloads an PACKAGES index file from CRAN, and then 200 small text files in parallel over HTTP/2 with verbosity turned on.

# Install the R package
install.packages('curl')

# Set the ws-proxy server
Sys.setenv(ALL_PROXY='socks5h://test:[email protected]:443')

# From here everything is normal R code:
df <- read.dcf(curl::curl('https://cran.rstudio.com/src/contrib/PACKAGES'))
pkgs <- df[1:200, 'Package']
urls <- sprintf('https://cran.rstudio.com/web/packages/%s/DESCRIPTION', pkgs)
destfiles <- sprintf('~/%s.txt', pkgs)
results <- curl::multi_download(urls, destfiles, verbose = TRUE)
all(results$status == 200)

# Read one of the files to show it is there
list.files('~')
readLines("~/abc.txt")

If you run this in the WebR test app you can also view the file in the WebUI under /home/web_user.

Test a local proxy server

On your local machine start the proxy server with:

docker run -it -p7777:7777 ghcr.io/r-wasm/ws-proxy

Now open the WebR test app and run:

# Need to use non-https ws:// for local testing!
webr::eval_js("SOCKFS.websocketArgs.url = 'ws://'")

# Same as before, but with localhost
Sys.setenv(ALL_PROXY="socks5h://test:yolo@localhost:7777")
install.packages("curl")
req <- curl::curl_fetch_memory('https://hb.cran.dev/get')
cat(rawToChar(req$content))

You should be able to see the proxy traffic in the docker terminal session.

NB: the first line is needed because the your local proxy server does not have properly signed https certificates by default. Hence we proxy using a HTTP instead of HTTPS websocket.