Proxying on the Edge: Part 1
This post is a part of an ongoing series on running web proxies using Cloudflare Workers.
Recently, I made a proxy called Superposition, running on Cloudflare’s Workers serverless platform.
You can check out its source code here.
How?
It turns out there’s already a project for proxying requests using CF Workers, called Workers-Proxy. It works by making a request to a fixed URL, then returning the response to the user. The only issue is that it only works with a single domain, which is hard-coded into the program.
Superposition fixes this issue by checking for a ?url= parameter in the requested URL. If the parameter is present, it proxies the provided URL. If not, it returns a landing page for you to input a URL.
Another feature of Superposition is that when it proxies a website, it also injects a button fixed to the top-left of the screen to go back to the landing page.
Why?
The idea was simple: Since existing proxy websites rely on a central server which may or may not be close to the user, why not use an established global network such as Cloudflare to proxy the requests?
What next?
I am currently working on a new proxy, dubbed Infrared, which is completely compliant with the TompHTTP specifications. Infrared aims to be more stable than Superposition, and includes more advanced features such as WebSocket proxying.