Leaf

A versatile and efficient proxy framework with nice features suitable for various use cases.

Multiplexing

There are 2 transports for traffic multiplexing:

AMux: A multiplexd transport based on reliable streams suitable for TCP-based protocols and transports
QUIC: A UDP-based, multiplexed and secure transport

The benefit of amux is that we can reuse connections to reduce handshake overhead, it's not designed to be memory efficient because it focus only on reusing connections and not reducing the number of connections. While quic can reduce both handshake overhead and memory usage without suffering the head-of-line blocking issue.

Transparent Proxying

There's the TUN inbound for this purpose, which is also of fundamental importance for VPN-like proxying use cases such as VPN apps on iOS and Android.

High Availability

Outbounds such as failover, tryall, retry, random and their combinations are able to flexibly deliver reqeusts to other outbounds based on their own metrics to achieve high availability or load balancing behaviors.

Request Routing

Rule-based request routing is also supported. Requests can be routed to different outbounds based on domain, IP, GEOIP and port rules.

Getting Started

[General]
dns-server = 223.5.5.5
socks-interface = 127.0.0.1
socks-port = 1080

[Proxy]
Direct = direct

More configuration examples can be found here.

TUN Mode and Gateway Mode

TUN Mode

This syntax (tun = auto) is supported on macOS and Linux.

[General]
dns-server = 223.5.5.5
tun = auto

[Proxy]
Direct = direct

Gateway Mode

Running in gateway mode requires a configuration with TUN mode enabled. Gateway mode can be enabled by an environment variable.

GATEWAY_MODE=true leaf -c config.conf

Windows

Maple: A lightweight Universal Windows proxy app based on leaf

iOS & Android

Leaf: A simple iOS VPN app built with leaf

There are example projects demonstrating how you could easily build VPN apps for iOS and Android with leaf:

iOS: https://github.com/eycorsican/ileaf
Android: https://github.com/eycorsican/aleaf

Build

Install Rust: https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install

Install GCC or Clang.

Clone & Build:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/eycorsican/leaf.git
cd leaf
cargo build -p leaf-bin

Run:

./target/debug/leaf -h

License

This project is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

A-W-C-J/leaf-1