man systemd-socket-proxyd (8): Bidirectionally proxy local sockets to another (possibly remote) socket.

SYNOPSIS

systemd-socket-proxyd [OPTIONS...] HOST:PORT
systemd-socket-proxyd [OPTIONS...] UNIX-DOMAIN-SOCKET-PATH

DESCRIPTION

systemd-socket-proxyd

is a generic socket-activated network socket forwarder proxy daemon for IPv4, IPv6 and UNIX stream sockets. It may be used to bi-directionally forward traffic from a local listening socket to a local or remote destination socket.

One use of this tool is to provide socket activation support for services that do not natively support socket activation. On behalf of the service to activate, the proxy inherits the socket from systemd, accepts each client connection, opens a connection to a configured server for each client, and then bidirectionally forwards data between the two.

This utility's behavior is similar to socat(1). The main differences for systemd-socket-proxyd are support for socket activation with "Accept=false" and an event-driven design that scales better with the number of connections.

OPTIONS

The following options are understood:

-h, --help

: Print a short help text and exit.

--version

: Print a short version string and exit.

EXIT STATUS

On success, 0 is returned, a non-zero failure code otherwise.

EXAMPLES

Simple Example

Use two services with a dependency and no namespace isolation.

Example 1. proxy-to-nginx.socket

[Socket]
ListenStream=80
[Install]
WantedBy=sockets.target

Example 2. proxy-to-nginx.service

[Unit]
Requires=nginx.service
After=nginx.service
[Service]
ExecStart=/lib/systemd/systemd-socket-proxyd /tmp/nginx.sock
PrivateTmp=yes
PrivateNetwork=yes

Example 3. nginx.conf

[...]
server {
    listen       unix:/tmp/nginx.sock;
    [...]

Example 4. Enabling the proxy

# systemctl enable proxy-to-nginx.socket
# systemctl start proxy-to-nginx.socket
$ curl http://localhost:80/

Namespace Example

Similar as above, but runs the socket proxy and the main service in the same private namespace, assuming that nginx.service has PrivateTmp= and PrivateNetwork= set, too.

Example 5. proxy-to-nginx.socket

[Socket]
ListenStream=80
[Install]
WantedBy=sockets.target

Example 6. proxy-to-nginx.service

[Unit]
Requires=nginx.service
After=nginx.service
JoinsNamespaceOf=nginx.service
[Service]
ExecStart=/lib/systemd/systemd-socket-proxyd 127.0.0.1:8080
PrivateTmp=yes
PrivateNetwork=yes

Example 7. nginx.conf

[...]
server {
    listen       8080;
    [...]

Example 8. Enabling the proxy

# systemctl enable proxy-to-nginx.socket
# systemctl start proxy-to-nginx.socket
$ curl http://localhost:80/