bridge docker container

brigde is a dynamic port forwarder over HTTP (with HTTP PROXY support). For more information on how this works see the original project on github.

This fork adds the necessary stuff to build a docker image for it. The application is not modified in any way. The docker container supports the client side as well as the server side, since thankfully both differ only in the parameters passed to the application. A prebuilt docker image is available from docker hub.

Server side

Since bridge is a tunnel through http, it is also possible to run the server side as a virtual host in the context of a reverse proxy, e.g. Jason Wilder's nginx-proxy. This allows using a computer as tunnel endpoint that is also serving web pages on port 80. The bridge application has no inbuilt support for SSL, so to get a secure connection you basically have two choices:

1. tunnel an otherwise secure protocol like ssh or
2. use the aforementioned nginx-proxy to handle the SSL part and let it talk non-encrypted http with bridge running inside the container. See the nginx-proxy documentation on how to do this (hint: environment HTTPS_METHOD).

A very basic docker-compose.yml file for running the server side as standalone service on http://yourhost.yourdomain.tld:80/bridge looks like this:

version: '2'

services:
    http-bridge:
        image: http-bridge
        ports:
            - "80:80"

If for some reason you want to change the port or directory the server listens to internally, add sth. like the following to the service's section:

       command: 8080 /bridge # first is the server port, second the directory
       expose:
           - "8080"          # by default, only port 80 is exposed
       ports:
           - "8080:8080"

A docker-compose.yml file for use with the nginx-proxy might look like this:

version: '2'

services:
    http-bridge:
        image: http-bridge
        network_mode: "bridge" # I put the nginx-proxy and it's backends on this network
        environment:
            - HTTPS_METHOD=noredirect
            - VIRTUAL_HOST=yourvirtualhost.yourdomain.tld

Client side

The main use case of bridge for me is tunneling ssh out, so here is a sample ~.ssh/config file for your client behind the firewall that uses the bridge container:

host yourhost
    HostName yourvirtualhost.yourdomain.tld
    ProxyCommand docker run -i http-bridge - http://%h/bridge %h 22

Now call ssh as usual:

client$ ssh yourhost
Password:

yourhost $