To browse internet with shadowsocks,

Server setup

You need a VPS (buy it from linode or digitalocean, etc, as the outlet), to run the server with root (say its IP address is "123.234.23.45"):

# aptitude install python-pip
# pip install shadowsocks
# ssserver -p 2043 -k er@20 -m aes-256-cfb --user nobody -d start

See the logs:

tail -f /var/log/shadowsocks.log

Or start it in foreground:

# ssserver -p 2043 -k testpwd

Client

Client is the machine you want to bypass the GFW.

Windows

Download the client package (Shadowsocks-win-dotnet4.0-2.3.1.zip for now), extract it, and run.

You can check its "System Proxy" option, which is convenient for all browsers and terminal.

Linux

Install

For Ubuntu/Mint:

$ sudo aptitude install python-pip
$ sudo pip install shadowsocks

Now you have a socks5 proxy. If you want convert it into a http proxy:

$ sudo aptitude install polipo
$ service polipo stop
$ sslocal -s 123.234.23.45 -p 2043 -b 127.0.0.1 -l 1080 -k testpwd
$ sudo polipo socksParentProxy=localhost:1080

Now setup the http proxy of your browser as localhost:8123. To use the proxy in terminal, add prefix "http_proxy=http://localhost:8123", for example:

http_proxy=http://localhost:8123 curl www.xys.org

Or use a text-based web browser:

http_proxy=http://localhost:8123 lynx rsf.org

where 8123 is the default port number of polipo.

Using Shadowsocks with Command Line Tools in shadowsocks wiki use proxychains to achieve proxy in terminal, which didn't work for me.

To summarize, you need 3 processes to access blocked website on Linux:

1. The shadowsocks server on the VPS abroad;

2. The shadowsocks client on your machine;

3. The polipo to convert a socks proxy into a http proxy.