Setting proxy for bash in debian

English: Xfce Terminal. on Debian Lenny. 日本語: Xfce Terminal。Debian Lennyで。 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In this post, I will explain you how to configure the default proxy for bash in Debian. I often see questions about this in forums, so I hope it will help. If so, I would love to see links pointing to this article: it will help others find it more easily thanks to a better ranking in Google search. Thanks!

Setting up the proxy globally

You can set the proxy globally in the files:

/etc/environment
/etc/profile

In this file you can specify the proxy for a given application for instance (see http://askubuntu.com/questions/158557/setting-proxy-from-terminal):

http_proxy=http://10.1.3.1:8080 firefox

For bash

It's possible to specify the proxy in bash directly:

sudo env http_proxy=http://10.1.3.1:8080

Or in your .bashrc profile (not advised as it may not be taken into account by some applications):

export http_proxy=http://username:password@proxyhost:port/ 
export ftp_proxy=http://username:password@proxyhost:port/

For aptitude (apt-get)

If you want to set the proxy for apt, the proper way is to edit /etc/apt/apt.conf and add:

Acquire::http::proxy "http://10.1.3.1:8080/";

For pip / easy_install

For pip, you can use the --proxy option to specify a proxy:

pip install toto --proxy "user:password@proxy.server:port"
pip install toto --proxy "example.com:1080"

English: Diagram of an open forward proxy. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But pip sometimes calls setup.py files that do not follow the proxy directives. In this case the best way is to position http_proxy environment variable, and use easy_install as an alternative to pip.

For SSH

You can use ssh through a SOCKS proxy, but you need to install a few tools:

sudo apt-get install connect-proxy
man connect-proxy
vim ~/.ssh/config

In this configuration file, you specify which proxy you want to use for which hosts. For example, on this site, they provide the following configuration sample:

## Outside of the firewall, with HTTPS proxy
Host my-ssh-server-host.net
  ProxyCommand connect -H proxy.free.fr:3128 %h 443
## Inside the firewall (do not use proxy)
Host *
   ProxyCommand connect %h %p

Note the -S command, that is used for SOCKS proxy (-H) is for HTTP proxies, for example:

ProxyCommand /usr/bin/connect-proxy -4 -S pproxy:port %h %p

SANS institute published a good article about all what you can do with SSH trough a proxy :)

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