Q:

How do you proxy though a server using ssh (socks…) using php’s CURL?

I want to use ssh, something like this:
ssh -D 9999 username@ip-address-of-ssh-server

But within php CURL, but I don't really see how this could be done?
I noticed “CURLPROXY_SOCKS5” as a type in the php site, but guess that wouldn’t work since it isn’t really socks, it’s ssh…
I’m currently using this code:
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, ‘ip:port'); 

But I'm using a free proxy and it’s rather slow and unreliable, I'm also sending sensitive information over this proxy. This is why I want to proxy it over a save server I trust, but I only have ssh setup on it and it’s unable to host a proper proxy.

A:

You can use both libssh2 and curl from within a PHP script.

First you need to get the ssh2 library from the PECL site. Alternatively, the PEAR package has SSH2 support too.
After installing you can then read the ssh2 documentation on setting up a tunnel.
In your script you can then set up the tunnel.
After the tunnel is set up in the script you can specify the CURL proxy.
Perform your CURL operation.
Release the tunnel resource and close the connection in your script.

I'm not a PHP expert, but here's a rough example:
<?php
$connection = ssh2_connect(ip-address-of-ssh-server, 22);
ssh2_auth_pubkey_file($connection, 'username', 'id_dsa.pub', 'id_dsa');
$tunnel = ssh2_tunnel($connection, '127.0.0.1', 9999);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, ‘127.0.0.1:9999'); 
// perform curl operations

// The connection and tunnel will die at the and of the session.
?>

The simplest option
Another option to consider is using sftp (ftp over ssh) instead of CURL... this is probably the recommended way to copy a file from one server to another securely in PHP...
Even simpler example:
<?php
$connection = ssh2_connect(ip-address-of-ssh-server, 22);
ssh2_auth_password($connection, 'username', 'password');
ssh2_scp_send($connection, '/local/filename', '/remote/filename', 0644);
?>

