Lean Socat: A Minimal, High-Performance socat Implementation

The server hung in silence, waiting. You typed the command, and Lean Socat made the connection—fast, direct, and without wasted motion. No GUI. No bloat. Just a precise tool for piping data between sockets, streams, and processes.

Lean Socat is a minimal, high-performance implementation of the powerful socat utility. It strips away extraneous code, leaving a clean, dependable binary that does exactly what you tell it. It’s built for quick deployment in environments where latency, footprint, and reliability all matter—containers, embedded systems, CI pipelines.

With Lean Socat, you can forward TCP ports, bridge UNIX sockets, tunnel raw data, or glue together disparate services without introducing a full proxy layer. It handles bidirectional data and works as both a client and a server. SSL/TLS, IPv4, IPv6, standard input/output—it supports them all, but without dragging along features that slow it down.

A common use case is standing up a secure TCP bridge directly between two endpoints. Another is routing data from a local process into a remote API socket for debugging or load testing. Lean Socat keeps these configurations simple—single-line commands that you can drop into shell scripts, Dockerfiles, or Kubernetes manifests.

Performance benchmarks show lower memory use and faster startup time compared to stock builds of socat. The binary is smaller, making it ideal for Alpine-based images or minimal VM deployments. You can audit the code in minutes, which means fewer surprises in production and clearer paths for custom patches.

If you need fine-grained control over network data flows, or a fast, dependable glue between isolated services, Lean Socat delivers with precision. It’s the leanest way to get socat’s power where you need it most.

See how Lean Socat runs inside hoop.dev and connect any service in minutes—try it live now.