wtf is socks5?

This project lets you run your own SOCKS5 proxy server using Python. A SOCKS5 server acts as a middleman between your device and the internet, when you connect through it, websites see the server's address instead of yours. That's useful for routing traffic through a different network location, testing how your app behaves from another region, or adding a layer of privacy. You start it from the command line, telling it which network interface and port to listen on. Clients connect to that address and their traffic flows through the server to its final destination. The server supports optional username-and-password authentication, where you point it at a simple text file listing credentials. You can also allow connections with no authentication at all if security isn't a concern for your use case. The typical user is someone who needs a lightweight proxy they control, a developer testing geo-restricted content, a person wanting to route traffic through a home server or cloud instance, or anyone who'd rather run their own proxy than rely on a third-party service. Because it's written in Python and uses asyncio, it can handle many concurrent connections without heavy resource demands, making it a good fit for small-to-medium workloads. The project is still early-stage. There's no packaged install yet, so you'd need to run it directly from the source. The README only mentions basic username/password auth, so if you need more advanced authentication methods, that's not available at this point. It's a straightforward tool that does one thing, run a SOCKS5 proxy, without much extra ceremony.