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Asad
Asked: 2012-08-13 21:15:07 +0800 CST

How do I configure proxies without GUI?

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How do you configure proxy settings in the Ubuntu Server or Minimal (CLI) versions using the terminal?

proxy

3 Answers

  1. System-wide proxies in CLI Ubuntu/Server must be set as environment variables.

    • Open the /etc/environment file with vi (or your favorite editor). This file stores the system-wide variables initialized upon boot.

    • Add the following lines, modifying appropriately. You must duplicate in both upper-case and lower-case because (unfortunately) some programs only look for one or the other:

      http_proxy="http://myproxy.server.com:8080/"
https_proxy="http://myproxy.server.com:8080/"
ftp_proxy="http://myproxy.server.com:8080/"
no_proxy="localhost,127.0.0.1,localaddress,.localdomain.com"
HTTP_PROXY="http://myproxy.server.com:8080/"
HTTPS_PROXY="http://myproxy.server.com:8080/"
FTP_PROXY="http://myproxy.server.com:8080/"
NO_PROXY="localhost,127.0.0.1,localaddress,.localdomain.com"

    • apt-get, aptitude, etc. will not obey the environment variables when used normally with sudo. So separately configure them; create a file called 95proxies in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/, and include the following:

      Acquire::http::proxy "http://myproxy.server.com:8080/";
Acquire::ftp::proxy "ftp://myproxy.server.com:8080/";
Acquire::https::proxy "https://myproxy.server.com:8080/";

    Finally, logout and reboot to make sure the changes take effect.

    Sources: 1, 2. See 1 in particular for additional help, including a script to quickly turn on/off the proxies.

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  2. If you have an authenticating proxy, then the URLs will be different. Instead of:

    "http://myproxy.server.com:8080/"

    You'll have:

    "http://user_name:[email protected]:8080/"

    Note that these are still URLs, so passwords (and possibly usernames) will have to be URL encoded.

    For example, a username of muru and a password of )qv3TB3LBm7EkP} would look like:

    "http://muru:)qv3TB3LBm7EkP%[email protected]:8080/"

    This can be done in various ways:

    1. There several websites for encoding:
    2. Programmatic:

    In a pinch, you can use man url to see which characters need to be encoded:

    An escaped octet is encoded as a character triplet, 
consisting of the percent character "%" followed by 
the two hexadecimal digits representing the octet code...

    And the octet codes are available on man ascii.

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  3.                                  Proxy Environment Variables:

    http_proxy: Proxy server for HTTP Traffic
    https_proxy: Proxy server for HTTPS traffic
    ftp_proxy: Proxy server for FTP traffic
    no_proxy: Patterns for IP addresses or domain names that shouldn’t use the proxy

    The value for every proxy setting, except for no_proxy, uses the same template. proxy_http=username:password@proxy-host:port

    Temporary setting proxy: export HTTP_PROXY=user:[email protected]:8080

    Persistent Proxy Settings: use vim ~/.bash_profile to open bash setup file, then put following lines inside it

    export http_proxy=username:[email protected]:8080
export https_proxy=username:[email protected]:8081
export no_proxy=localhost, 127.0.0.1, *.my.lan

    use source ~/.bash_profile to apply the changes

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