Port Forwarder

What This Skill Does

The Port Forwarder skill for OpenClaw is a powerful utility designed to abstract the complexities of SSH tunneling and port management. It enables you to securely connect to private network services, bypass firewall restrictions, and create robust SOCKS proxies for anonymous or segmented browsing. By automating the syntax for Local Port Forwarding, Remote Port Forwarding, and Dynamic SOCKS proxies, this skill allows users to treat remote, firewalled services as if they were running on their own machine. It includes support for process management, persistent connections via autossh, and diagnostic tools to ensure your tunnels remain stable during long-running sessions.

Installation

To install this skill, use the OpenClaw hub CLI tool: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/sa9saq/port-forwarder Ensure that you have an OpenSSH-compliant client installed on your host system. For production-grade stability and automatic reconnection, ensure the autossh utility is also present on your system path.

Use Cases

• Remote Development: Forward a remote database port (e.g., PostgreSQL or MongoDB) to your local machine to use local development tools or IDEs against remote data.
• Firewall Traversal: Access internal dashboards or administrative interfaces behind a jump host without exposing them to the public internet.
• Secure Proxying: Route traffic through a trusted remote server to bypass restrictive network policies or to appear as if you are browsing from the remote server's location.
• Exposing Local Services: Temporarily expose a locally running web server (like a development frontend) to the public internet via a remote public-facing server.

Example Prompts

1. "OpenClaw, please set up a local port forward to access the database on staging-server at port 5432 and map it to my local port 5433."
2. "I need to access an internal dashboard at 192.168.1.50:8080 through jump-host.example.com. Set up an SSH tunnel for me."
3. "Start a persistent SOCKS proxy on port 1080 via my VPS and make sure it auto-reconnects if the connection drops."

Tips & Limitations

When using this skill, always prioritize security. Avoid binding sensitive services to 0.0.0.0 unless you have strict firewall rules in place, as this can expose services to unintended network interfaces. If a tunnel appears active but services aren't reachable, verify that the remote service is actually listening on localhost. For persistent requirements, always prefer the autossh implementation over basic ssh -fN commands to handle network interruptions gracefully. Monitor your active processes periodically using the provided management commands to prevent orphaned tunnels from consuming system resources or creating security gaps.