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Transparent Squid in a container

This is a trivial Dockerfile to build a proxy container. It will use the famous Squid proxy, configured to work in transparent mode.

Why?

If you build a lot of containers, and have a not-so-fast internet link, you might be spending a lot of time waiting for packages to download. It would be nice if all those downloads could be automatically cached, without tweaking your Dockerfiles, right?

Or, maybe your corporate network forbids direct outside access, and require you to use a proxy. Then you can edit this recipe so that it cascades to the corporate proxy. Your containers will use the transparent proxy, which itself will pass along to the corporate proxy.

How?

You can use the squid proxy directly via docker and iptables rules, there is also a docker-compose.yml for convenience to use docker-compose up command to launch the system. For more information on tuning parameters see below.

Using Docker and iptables directly.

You can manually run these commands

docker run --net host -d jpetazzo/squid-in-a-can
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to 3129 -w

After you stop you will need to cleanup the iptables rules:

iptables -t nat -D PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to 3129 -w

Using Compose

There is a docker-compose.yml file to enable launching via docker compose and a separate container which will setup the iptables rules for you. To use this you will need a local checkout of this repo and have docker and compose installed.

Run the following command in the same directory as the docker-compose.yml file:

docker-compose up

Result

That's it. Now all HTTP requests going through your Docker host will be transparently routed through the proxy running in the container.

If you your tproxy instance goes down hard without cleaning up use the following command:

iptables -t nat -D PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to 3129 -w

Note: it will only affect HTTP traffic on port 80.

Note: traffic originating from the host will not be affected, because the PREROUTING chain is not traversed by packets originating from the host.

Note: if your Docker host is also a router for other things (e.g. if it runs various virtual machines, or is a VPN server, etc), those things will also see their HTTP traffic routed through the proxy. They have to use internal IP addresses, though.

Note: if you plan to run this on EC2 (or any kind of infrastructure where the machine has an internal IP address), you should probably tweak the ACLs, or make sure that outside machines cannot access ports 3128 and 3129 on your host.

Note: It will be available to as a proxy on port 3128 on your local machine if you would like to setup local proxies yourself.

What?

The jpetazzo/squid-in-a-can container runs a really basic Squid3 proxy. Rather than writing my own configuration file, I patch the default Debian configuration. The main thing is to enable intercept on another port (here, 3129). To update the iptables for the intercept the command needs the --privileged flag.

Then, this container should be started using the network namespace of the host (that's what the --net host option is for). Another strategy would be to start the container with its own namespace. Then, the HTTP traffic can be directed to it with a DNAT rule. The problem with this approach, is that Squid will "see" the traffic as being directed to its own IP address, instead of the destination HTTP server IP address; and since Squid 3.3, it refuses to honor such requests.

(The reasoning is, that it would then have to trust the HTTP Host: header to know where to send the request. You can check CVE-2009-0801 for details.)

Tuning

The docker image can be tuned using environment variables.

MAX_CACHE_OBJECT

Squid has a maximum object cache size. Often when caching debian packages vs standard web content it is valuable to increase this size. Use the -e MAX_CACHE_OBJECT=1024 to set the max object size (in MB)

DISK_CACHE_SIZE

The squid disk cache size can be tuned. use -e DISK_CACHE_SIZE=5000 to set the disk cache size (in MB)

SQUID_DIRECTIVES_ONLY

The contents of squid.conf will only be what's defined in SQUID_DIRECTIVES giving the user full control of squid.

SQUID_DIRECTIVES

This will append any contents of the environment variable to squid.conf. It is expected that you will use multi-line block quote for the contents.

Here is an example:

docker run -d \
    -e SQUID_DIRECTIVES="
    # hi ho hi ho
    # we're doing block I/O
    # hi ho hi ho
    " jpetazzo/squid-in-a-can

Persistent Cache

Being docker when the instance exits the cached content immediately goes away when the instance stops. To avoid this you can use a mounted volume. The cache location is /var/cache/squid3 so if you mount that as a volume you can get persistent caching. Use -v /home/user/persistent_squid_cache:/var/cache/squid3 in your command line to enable persistent caching.

If you do that, make sure that the persistent_squid_cache directory is writable by the right user. As I write these lines, the squid process runs as user and group proxy, and their UID and GID both are 13; so make sure that the directory is writable by UID 13, or by GID 13, or (if you really can't make otherwise) world-writable (but please don't).

Note that if you're using Docker Mac, all volume I/O is handled by the Docker Mac application, which runs as an ordinary process; so you won't have to deal with permissions as long as you have read/write access to a volume.

Notes

Ideas for improvement:

  • easy chaining to an upstream proxy

HTTPS support

It has been asked if this could support HTTPS. HTTPS is designed to prevent man-in-the middle attacks, and a transparent proxy is effectively a MITM. If you want to use squid for HTTPS proxying transparently you need to setup a private CA certificate and push it to all your users so they trust the proxy. An example of how to set this up can be found here.

Without a CA certificate configured, the default behavior is to tunnel HTTPS traffic using the CONNECT method. Squid makes the request on behalf of the client but cannot decrypt or cache the requests or responses.