How to Set Up a Lightweight HTTP Proxy Server on AWS EC2

Takahiro Iwasa

8/30/2022

1 min read

EC2 Proxy.py Python

This note describes how to set up Proxy.py, a lightweight HTTP proxy server, on an EC2 instance.

ℹ️ Note

On May 27, 2022, AWS introduced port forwarding to remote hosts. For more information, please refer to the official documentation.

Setting Up

Install Proxy.py with the following command:

pip install proxy.py

Start Proxy.py using this command:

proxy --port 8080

To ensure Proxy.py runs even after closing the SSH session, use the following command:

nohup proxy --port 8080 > /dev/null &

After launching, you should see logs similar to this in the terminal:

1
pid:3330 [I] plugins.load:85 - Loaded plugin proxy.http.proxy.HttpProxyPlugin
2
pid:3330 [I] tcp.listen:82 - Listening on 127.0.0.1:8080
3
pid:3330 [I] pool.setup:108 - Started 1 acceptors in threaded mode
4
...

Testing

Establish an SSH tunnel to your EC2 instance:

ssh -L 8080:localhost:8080 -i .ssh/YOUR_PRIVATE_KEY ec2-user@YOUR_HOST

Test the proxy by sending a request to Google:

curl www.google.com -x http://localhost:8080

If the proxy is working correctly, you should receive an HTML response from Google.