Ladder

Ladder is a http web proxy.

Ladder is a developer tool for testing and analyzing paywall implementations and content delivery behavior on modern websites.

It allows developers, researchers, and publishers to simulate different client environments (such as browsers and crawlers) and observe how content is served under varying conditions. This makes it useful for debugging paywall configurations, verifying access controls, http headers, and ensuring consistent behavior across different user agents.

Ladder is intended for legitimate testing, research, and quality assurance purposes only. It should only be used in compliance with applicable laws and the terms of service of the target website.

How it works

sequenceDiagram
    client->>+ladder: GET
    ladder-->>ladder: apply RequestModifications
    ladder->>+website: GET
    website->>-ladder: 200 OK
    ladder-->>ladder: apply ResultModifications
    ladder->>-client: 200 OK

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Features

• Remove/modify CORS headers from responses, assets, and images ...
• Remove/modify other headers (e.g. Content-Security-Policy)
• Remove/inject custom code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) into the page
• Apply domain based ruleset/code to modify response / requested URL
• Keep site browsable
• API
• Fetch RAW HTML
• Custom User Agent
• Custom X-Forwarded-For IP
• Docker container (amd64, arm64)
• Linux binary
• Mac OS binary
• Windows binary (untested)
• Basic Auth
• Access logs
• Might break tracking, adds and other 3rd party content
• Limit the proxy to a list of domains
• Expose Ruleset to other ladders
• Robots.txt testing
• Optional TOR proxy
• A key to share a proxied URL

Limitations

Some websites deliver different content (Cloaking) depending on the type of client accessing them (for example, search engine crawlers versus standard web browsers). Ladder can be configured to emulate different client types in order to retrieve publicly accessible content for testing, automation, or research purposes.

However, many websites implement advanced mechanisms to restrict automated access, such as fingerprinting, rate limiting, or behavioral analysis. Ladder does not circumvent such protections and may not function correctly on services that actively restrict or control access.

Third-party tools such as FlareSolverr exist and may be used independently to render web pages in a headless browser environment. These tools are not part of Ladder, and their use may be subject to legal and contractual restrictions. Users are solely responsible for ensuring that their usage complies with all applicable regulations.

Installation

Warning: If your instance will be publicly accessible, make sure to enable Basic Auth. This will prevent unauthorized users from using your proxy. If you do not enable Basic Auth, anyone can use your proxy to browse nasty/illegal stuff. And you will be made responsible for it.

Binary

1. Download binary here
2. Unpack and run the binary ./ladder -r https://raw.githubusercontent.com/everywall/ladder-rules/main/ruleset.yaml
3. Open Browser (Default: http://localhost:8080)

Docker

docker run -p 8080:8080 -d --env RULESET=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/everywall/ladder-rules/main/ruleset.yaml --name ladder ghcr.io/everywall/ladder:latest

Docker Compose

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/everywall/ladder/main/docker-compose.yaml --output docker-compose.yaml
docker-compose up -d

Helm

See README.md in helm-chart sub-directory for more information.

Usage

Browser

1. Open Browser (Default: http://localhost:8080)
2. Enter URL
3. Press Enter

Or direct by appending the URL to the end of the proxy URL: http://localhost:8080/https://www.example.com

Or create a bookmark with the following URL:

javascript:window.location.href="http://localhost:8080/"+location.href

API

curl -X GET "http://localhost:8080/api/https://www.example.com"

RAW

http://localhost:8080/raw/https://www.example.com

Running Ruleset

http://localhost:8080/ruleset

Configuration

Environment Variables

Variable	Description	Value
PORT	Port to listen on	8080
PREFORK	Spawn multiple server instances	false
USER_AGENT	User agent to emulate	Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
X_FORWARDED_FOR	IP forwarder address	66.249.66.1
USERPASS	Enables Basic Auth, format admin:123456	``
LOG_URLS	Log fetched URL's	true
DISABLE_FORM	Disables URL Form Frontpage	false
FORM_PATH	Path to custom Form HTML	``
RULESET	Path or URL to a ruleset file, accepts local directories	https://raw.githubusercontent.com/everywall/ladder-rules/main/ruleset.yaml or /path/to/my/rules.yaml or /path/to/my/rules/
EXPOSE_RULESET	Make your Ruleset available to other ladders	true
ALLOWED_DOMAINS	Comma separated list of allowed domains. Empty = no limitations	``
ALLOWED_DOMAINS_RULESET	Allow Domains from Ruleset. false = no limitations	false
FLARESOLVERR_HOST	URL for the FlareSolverr service for Cloudflare bypass (optional)	http://localhost:8191

ALLOWED_DOMAINS and ALLOWED_DOMAINS_RULESET are joined together. If both are empty, no limitations are applied.

Ruleset

It is possible to apply custom rules to modify the response or the requested URL. This can be used to remove unwanted or modify elements from the page. The ruleset is a YAML file, a directory with YAML Files, or an URL to a YAML file that contains a list of rules for each domain. These rules are loaded on startup.

There is a basic ruleset available in a separate repository ruleset.yaml. Feel free to add your own rules and create a pull request.

- domain: example.com          # Includes all subdomains
  domains:                     # Additional domains to apply the rule
    - www.example.de
    - www.beispiel.de
  headers:
    x-forwarded-for: none      # override X-Forwarded-For header or delete with none
    referer: none              # override Referer header or delete with none
    user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
    content-security-policy: script-src 'self'; # override response header
    cookie: privacy=1
  regexRules:
    - match: <script\s+([^>]*\s+)?src="(/)([^"]*)"
      replace: <script $1 script="/https://www.example.com/$3"
  injections:
    - position: head # Position where to inject the code
      append: |      # possible keys: append, prepend, replace
        <script>
          window.localStorage.clear();
          console.log("test");
          alert("Hello!");
        </script>
- domain: www.anotherdomain.com # Domain where the rule applies
  useFlareSolverr: false        # Use FlareSolverr for Cloudflare bypass (optional, default: false)
  paths:                        # Paths where the rule applies
    - /article
  googleCache: false            # Use Google Cache to fetch the content
  regexRules:                   # Regex rules to apply
    - match: <script\s+([^>]*\s+)?src="(/)([^"]*)"
      replace: <script $1 script="/https://www.example.com/$3"
  injections:
    - position: .left-content article .post-title # Position where to inject the code into DOM
      replace: | 
        <h1>My Custom Title</h1>
    - position: .left-content article # Position where to inject the code into DOM
      prepend: | 
        <h2>Subtitle</h2>
- domain: demo.com
  headers:
    content-security-policy: script-src 'self';
    user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
  urlMods:              # Modify the URL
    query:              
      - key: amp        # (this will append ?amp=1 to the URL)
        value: 1 
    domain:             
      - match: www      # regex to match part of domain
        replace: amp    # (this would modify the domain from www.demo.de to amp.demo.de)
    path:               
      - match: ^        # regex to match part of path
        replace: /amp/  # (modify the url from https://www.demo.com/article/ to https://www.demo.de/amp/article/)

FlareSolverr Integration

Ladder now supports integration with FlareSolverr to bypass Cloudflare protection and other anti-bot challenges. This is particularly useful for sites that employ sophisticated bot detection mechanisms.

Setting up FlareSolverr

1. Using Docker Compose (Recommended):

   # docker-compose.yaml
   services:
     ladder:
       image: ghcr.io/everywall/ladder:latest
       ports:
         - "8080:8080"
       environment:
         - RULESET=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/everywall/ladder-rules/main/ruleset.yaml
         # - FLARESOLVERR_HOST=http://flaresolverr:8191
       depends_on:
         - flaresolverr
     
     flaresolverr:
       image: ghcr.io/flaresolverr/flaresolverr:latest
       ports:
         - "8191:8191"
       environment:
         - LOG_LEVEL=info

2. Running FlareSolverr separately:

   docker run -d \
     --name flaresolverr \
     -p 8191:8191 \
     ghcr.io/flaresolverr/flaresolverr:latest

   Then start Ladder with the FlareSolverr URL:

   FLARESOLVERR_HOST=http://localhost:8191 ./ladder

Configuring Rules for FlareSolverr

To use FlareSolverr for specific domains, add the useFlareSolverr: true flag in your ruleset:

# Example ruleset with FlareSolverr
- domain: cloudflare-protected-site.com
  useFlareSolverr: true  # Enable FlareSolverr for this domain
  headers:
    user-agent: "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36"
    accept: "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8"

# Regular site without FlareSolverr
- domain: regular-site.com
  headers:
    user-agent: "Custom User Agent 1.0"

Use Cases

FlareSolverr integration is particularly useful for:

• Cloudflare-protected sites: Sites using Cloudflare's anti-bot challenges
• Sites with JavaScript challenges: Pages that require JavaScript execution to access content
• Dynamic content loading: Sites that load content dynamically through JavaScript
• Advanced bot detection: Sites using sophisticated fingerprinting and bot detection techniques

Important Notes

• FlareSolverr adds additional latency to requests as it needs to solve challenges
• Only enable useFlareSolverr for domains that actually need it to maintain performance
• FlareSolverr requires more resources as it runs a headless browser
• Make sure FlareSolverr is running and accessible before enabling it in your ruleset

Development

To run a development server at http://localhost:8080:

echo "dev" > handlers/VERSION
RULESET="./ruleset.yaml" go run cmd/main.go

Optional: Live reloading development server with cosmtrek/air

Install air according to the installation instructions.

Run a development server at http://localhost:8080:

air # or the path to air if you haven't added a path alias to your .bashrc or .zshrc

This project uses pnpm to build a stylesheet with the Tailwind CSS classes. For local development, if you modify styles in form.html, run pnpm build to generate a new stylesheet.