The idea was born out of my frustration with accessing my self-hosted services when I'm on the go. I use WireGuard to connect to my homelab, but I really dislike sending all my computer's traffic through my home network — it slows things down and is inconvenient.

I wanted proper application-level split-tunneling. A tool I love, wireproxy, got me most of the way there by creating an HTTP proxy from a WireGuard peer. This is perfect for apps that let you configure a proxy.

The problem was the other 10%: apps that don't. Think of browser extensions or simple clients that just have a single URL field.

That's why I created prxy. It's a dead-simple local reverse proxy that forwards traffic to another outbound proxy (like wireproxy). The key feature is that it automatically rewrites the Host header, so the request reaches the correct backend service in my homelab, even behind another reverse proxy.

For example, to get a browser extension working with my self-hosted Karakeep instance, I just run:

``` prxy --target https://karakeep.my-homelab.tld \ --proxy http://127.0.0.1:25345 \ --port 12345 ```

By setting the extension's URL to http://localhost:12345, it just works as if I were on my local network.

Hopefully, this can be useful to others in the community.