search

PHProxy / phproxy

PHP based web proxy. Initially developed by whitefyre
http://phproxy.github.io/
Other
123 stars 72 forks source link

readme

PHProxy

AUR

PHProxy is a web HTTP proxy written in PHP. It is designed to bypass proxy restrictions through a web interface very similar to the popular CGIProxy. The only thing that PHProxy needs is a web server with PHP installed (see Requirements below). Be aware though, that the sever has to be able to access those resources to deliver them to you.

Originaly developed in SourceForge during 2002-2007 and then abandoned. This project needs to live and it's development is continued here.

Support

License

This source code is released under the GPL. A copy of the license is provided in this package in the filename LICENSE.md.

Requirements

Installation

Copy the files of the repository in your public web server folder or to a directory of your liking (prefrebly in its own directory).

cd /var/www/html/
git clone https://github.com/PHProxy/phproxy.git

How it Works

You simply supply a URL to the form and click Browse. The script then accesses that URL, and if it has any HTML contents, it modifies any URLs so that they point back to the script. Of course, there is more to it than this, but if you would like to know more in detail, view the source code.

Bugs and Limitations

PHP is restrictive by nature, and as such, some problems arise that would have not if this project were otherwise coded in another programming language. The first example of this is the dots in incoming variable names from POST and GET methods. In a normal programming language, this wouldn't be a problem as these variables could be accessed normally as they are supplied, with dots included. In PHP, however, dots in GET, POST, and COOKIE variable names are magically transformed into underscores because of register_globals. Things like Yahoo! Mail which has dots in variable names will not work. There's no easy way around this, but luckily, I have provided the solutions right here:

  1. I've already taken care of cookies by manually transforming the underscores manually into dots when needed.
  2. For GET variables, this shouldn't be a huge problem since the URLs are URL-encoded into the url_var_name. The only time this should be an issue is when a GET form uses dots in input names, and this could be recitified by using $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'], and parsing that variable. But this, luckily, doesn't happen too often.
  3. As for POST data, one solution is to use $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA. But then, this variable might not be available in certain PHP configurations, and it would need further parsing, and it still doesn't account for uploaded FILES. This is extremely impractical and ugly.

The best thing you could do if you have enough control over your Web server and can compile custom builds of PHP is to delete a single line in a PHP source code file called "php_variables.c" located in the "main" directory. The function in question is called "php_register_variable_ex". I've only checked this with PHP v4.4.4 and the exact line to delete is 117th line which basically consists of this:

        case '.':

Now just compile and install PHP and everything should be fine. Just make sure that you have register_globals off or something might get messed up.

Another problem facing many Web proxies is support for JavaScript. The best thing you could do right now is to have the JavaScript disabled on your browsing options as most sites degrade gracefully, such as Gmail.

A third limitation for Web proxies is content accessed from within proxied Flash and Java applications and such. Since the proxy script doesn't have access to the source code of these applications, the links which they may decide to stream or access will not be proxified. There's no easy solution for this right now.

PHProxy also doesn't support FTP. This may or may not be introduced in future releases, but there are no current plans for FTP support.