jpillora/chisel

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

16448 stars · 1604 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Chisel is a fast TCP/UDP tunnel transported over HTTP and secured via SSH, shipped as a single Go executable containing both client and server. It is mainly useful for passing through firewalls and providing a secure endpoint into a private network.

Use cases

• tunnel TCP traffic through firewalls over HTTP
• expose a service behind NAT to the internet securely
• create a SOCKS5 proxy through a remote server
• reverse port forwarding from a server out through a client
• use as an SSH ProxyCommand to reach SSH servers over HTTP
• securely access internal network endpoints from outside

When to choose

• you need a single static binary with no dependencies for tunneling
• you must traverse restrictive firewalls or proxies that only allow HTTP
• you want encrypted, authenticated tunnels with auto-reconnect
• you need reverse tunnels or SOCKS5 support in the same tool

When to avoid

• you need a full VPN with IP-layer routing rather than port-level tunnels
• you already run WireGuard or a site-to-site VPN that fits your needs
• you need a GUI-managed tunneling solution
• you require high-throughput raw TCP forwarding without HTTP overhead

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

networking proxy security cryptography networking security developer-tools self-hosted windows cross-platform go cli tcp-tunnel udp-tunnel http-tunnel port-forwarding ssh firewall-traversal reverse-proxy socks5 linux macos docker

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="jpillora/chisel")