How do I configure proxies without GUI?

Question

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

Answer 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.

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

Answer 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:password@myproxy.server.com: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%7D@myproxy.server.com:8080/"

This can be done in various ways:

1. There several websites for encoding:
   • http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/
   • http://www.url-encode-decode.com/
   • http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/topics/urlencoding.htm etc.
2. Programmatic:
   • A bash script from Stack Overflow
   • In Perl, from Stack Overflow

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.