Put some nice SOCKS on your HTTP only program

Driven by my burning desire to tunnel npm install requests through a SOCKSv5 proxy (eg. shadowsocks). Since npm only support HTTP proxy, I wrote this simple command line module to fire up a HTTP Proxy server, then use it to tunnel requests to my SOCKS proxy.

• Supports HTTP and HTTPS requests
• Built-in DNS cache
• 150 loc, does nothing else

npm install kneesocks --production -g

kneesocks port1 port2, eg. kneesocks 10001 10002

• port1 is the port your HTTP proxy server listen to on localhost.
• port2 is the port of your existing SOCKS proxy, also on localhost.

Then you can set your npm config:

• npm config set http http://127.0.0.1:10001
• npm config set https-proxy http://127.0.0.1:10001

To revert proxy config, use npm config delete http and npm config delete https-proxy.

To debug, use DEBUG=proxy kneesocks port1 port2

• Node v0.10+ required (Node v0.11+ preferred).
• Probably not the best solution for day-to-day browsing, due to lack of remote dns and websocket support.
• If you don't mind building binaries, use DeleGate or Polipo instead.

MIT