Let Chrome Use SSH Proxy

Sometimes, we need to remotely access websites that can only be accessed from the server’s network, such as the router’s Web control panel. Using links on the server is obviously unreliable. We can establish a tunnel between the local machine and the server using ssh, allowing the local browser to access restricted websites through the tunnel.

First, use ssh -D to establish a socks5 tunnel between the local machine and the server: (60000 is an arbitrary integer greater than 1024 and less than 65536)

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ssh -C2qTnN -D 60000 user@remote-host

Then, let Chrome access through the socks5 tunnel. The Chrome plugin ProxySwitchy no longer works because Chrome no longer supports NPAPI, and ProxySwitchySharp sometimes doesn’t work. Some articles online say that chrome –proxy-server is enough, but in fact, it doesn’t work when you have another Chrome instance open, because Chrome will automatically find the open instance.

A more reliable method is to open Incognito mode and use a non-existent Chrome user data directory to prevent it from finding open instances. After use, it is best to delete the newly created user data directory (in the following example, it is C:\Temp\Chrome). Note that the following socks5 cannot be replaced with http, as they are different protocols.

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PS C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application> .\chrome.exe --proxy-server="socks5://127.0.0.1:60000" -incognito -user-data-dir=C:\Temp\Chrome