sshuttle/sshuttle

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

13530 stars · 795 forks observed · 2026-08-28

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

sshuttle is a transparent proxy server that works as a poor man's VPN, forwarding traffic over SSH without requiring admin access on the remote network. It supports DNS tunneling and runs on Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, and Windows.

Use cases

• access a remote network over ssh without a real VPN
• route all local traffic through a remote ssh server
• tunnel DNS requests through ssh
• avoid setting up ssh port forwards for every host and port
• connect to a remote network without admin privileges
• replace complex VPN setups like IPsec or PPTP

When to choose

• you have ssh access to a remote network but no VPN or admin rights
• you want transparent subnet routing over ssh without per-port forwards
• you need a lightweight VPN alternative on Linux or macOS

When to avoid

• you need a full production VPN with strong encryption and multi-user management
• you cannot use ssh to reach the remote network
• you need high-throughput tunneling where TCP-over-TCP overhead matters

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

proxy vpn networking security networking security privacy developer-tools windows bsd python cli transparent-proxy ssh-tunneling poor-mans-vpn dns-tunneling port-forwarding command-line linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

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