socat is a general purpose tool for bidirectional network forwarding. You can set up a simple tunnel on localhost like:
$ socat TCP-LISTEN=5000,bind=localhost,reuseaddr,fork TCP:192.168.1.22:80
You can leverage socat to link container ports, e.g. when developing kubectl-trace locally I want my docker registry to push to minikube’s registry.
$ docker run -d \
--restart=always \
--name='minikube-registry-proxy' \
--network=host \
alpine \
ash -c "apk add socat && socat TCP-LISTEN:5000,reuseaddr,fork TCP:$(minikube ip):5000"