wsgiprox 1.4

HTTP/S proxy with WebSockets over WSGI

wsgiprox

wsgiprox is a Python WSGI middleware for adding HTTP and HTTPS proxy support to a WSGI application.

The library accepts HTTP and HTTPS proxy connections, and routes them to a designated prefix.

Usage

For example, given a WSGI callable application, the middleware could be defined as follows:

from wsgiprox.wsgiprox import WSGIProxMiddleware

application = WSGIProxMiddleware(application, '/prefix/', 'wsgiprox')

With the above configuration, the middleware is configured to add a prefix of /prefix/ to any url, unless it is to the proxy host wsgiprox. Assuming a WSGI server running on port 8080, the middleware would translate HTTP/S proxy connections to a non-proxy WSGI request, and pass to the wrapped application:

• Proxy Request: curl -x "localhost:8080" "http://example.com/path/file.html?A=B"

  Becomes equivalent to: curl "http://localhost:8080/prefix/http://example.com/path/file.html?A=B"

• Proxy Request: curl -k -x "localhost:8080" "https://example.com/path/file.html?A=B"

  Becomes equivalent to: curl "http://localhost:8080/prefix/https://example.com/path/file.html?A=B"

• Proxy Request to proxy host: curl -k -x "localhost:8080" "https://wsgiprox/path/file.html?A=B"

  Not adding prefix for wsgiprox, becomes equivalent to: curl -H "Host: wsgiprox" "http://localhost:8080/path/file.html?A=B"

All standard WSGI environ fields are set to the expected values for the translated url.

When a request passes through wsgiprox middleware, environ['wsgiprox.proxy_host'] is set to the proxy host. In this example, the WSGI app could check that environ.get('wsgiprox.proxy_host') == 'wsgiprox' to ensure that it was a proxy request. If the request is to the proxy host itself, then it is passed to the WSGI app without prefixing, and environ['wsgiprox.proxy_host'] == environ['HTTP_HOST']

Custom Resolvers

The provided FixedResolver simply prepends a fixed prefix to each url. A custom resolver could compute the final url in a different way. The resolver instance is called with the full url, and the original WSGI environ. The result is the translated REQUEST_URI that is passed to the WSGI applictaion.

See resolvers.py for all available resolvers.

For example, the following Resolver translates the url to a custom prefix based on the remote IP of the original request.

class IPResolver(object):
    def __call__(self, url, environ):
        return '/' + environ['REMOTE_ADDR'] + '/' + url

application = WSGIProxMiddleware(application, IPResolver())

HTTPS CA

To support HTTPS proxy, wsgiprox creates a custom CA (Certificate Authority), which must be accepted by the client (or it must ignore cert verification as with the -k option in CURL)

By default, wsgiprox looks for CA .pem at: <working dir>/ca/wsgiprox-ca.pem and auto-creates this bundle using the certauth library.

The CA name and CA root cert filename can also be specified explicitly via proxy_options dict.

By default, the following options are used:

WSGIProxMiddleware(..., proxy_options={ca_name='wsgiprox https proxy CA',
                                       ca_file='./ca/wsgiprox-ca.pem'})

The generated wsgiprox-ca.pem can be imported directly into most browsers directly as a trusted certificate authority, allowing the browser to accept HTTPS content proxied through wsgiprox

Downloading Certs

The CA cert can be downloaded directly from the proxy directly. This allows for quick installation into a client/browser.

• curl -x "localhost:8080" http://wsgiprox/download/pem will download in PEM format (for most platforms)

• curl -x "localhost:8080" http://wsgiprox/download/p12 will download in PKCS12 format (for Windows)

The download host is the same as proxy main host, though can be changed via download_host param to WSGIProxMiddleware constructor.

Custom Proxy Host Apps

It’s is also possible to configure a custom WSGI app per proxy host, eg:

• curl -x "localhost:8080" https://proxy-app-1/path/ is passed to proxy-app-1

• curl -x "localhost:8080" https://proxy-app-2/foo is passed to proxy-app-2

This can be done via:

from wsgiprox.wsgiprox import WSGIProxMiddleware

proxy_apps = {"proxy-app-1": ProxyApp1WSGI(),
              "proxy-app-2": ProxyApp2WSGI(),
              "proxy-alias": None,
             }

application = WSGIProxMiddleware(application, proxy_apps=apps)

All other requests, or any requests not handled by the proxy app, are passed to the main application.

In the last case, since there is no proxy app, the request is passed directly to wrapped application. The wsgiprox.proxy_host would be set to 'proxy-alias' instead of the default 'wsgiprox', allowing the application to differentiate handling based on the value of wsgiprox.proxy_host.

Internally, the proxy_apps dict is used to configure the cert downloader app and default proxy host:

proxy_apps['proxy_host'] = None
proxy_apps['download_host'] = CertDownloader(self.ca)

Websockets

wsgiprox optionally also supports proxying websockets, both unencryped ws:// and via TLS wss://. The websockets proxy functionality has primarily been tested with and requires the gevent-websocket library, and assumes that the wrapped WSGI application is also using this library for websocket support. Other implementations are not yet supported.

To enable websocket proxying, install with pip install wsgiprox[gevent-websocket] which will install gevent-websocket. To disable websocket proxying even with gevent-websocket installed, add proxy_options={'enable_websockets': False}

See the test suite for additional details.

How it Works / A note about WSGI

wsgiprox supports several different proxying methods:

• HTTP direct proxy, no tunnel

• HTTP CONNECT tunnel for websockets, no SSL

• HTTP CONNECT tunnel with SSL (also supports websockets)

For regular HTTP proxy, wsgiprox simply rewrites a host-qualifed request such as GET http://example.com/, and passes it along to underlying WSGI app.

The other proxy methods involve the HTTP CONNECT verb and explicitly establishing a tunnel using the underlying socket. For HTTPS/SSL proxying, an SSL socket is established over the tunnel, while HTTP websocket proxy uses the underlying socket directly.

The system thus relies on being able to access the underyling socket for the connection. As WSGI spec does not provide a way to do this, wsgiprox is not guaranteed to work under any WSGI server. The CONNECT verb creates a tunnel, and the tunneled connection is what is passed to the wrapped WSGI application. This is non-standard behavior and may not work on all WSGI servers.

This middleware has been tested primarily with gevent WSGI server and uWSGI.

There is also support for gunicorn and wsgiref, as they provide a way to access the underlying success. If the underlying socket can not be accessed, the CONNECT verb will fail with a 405.

It may be possible to extend support to additional WSGI servers by extending WSGIProxMiddleware.get_raw_socket() to be able to find the underlying socket.

Inspiration

This project draws inspiration from a lot of previous efforts.

Much of the functionality is a refactoring and spin-off of the proxy functionality in pywb, which is built on top of standalone CA handling library certauth.

certauth was refactored from an earlier implementation in warcprox (which also inspired this name!).

The certificate download feature was inspired by a similar feature available in mitmprox

License

wsgiprox is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License and is part of the Webrecorder project.

See NOTICE and LICENSE for details.