How to get APT to work through a proxy..
APT is the core of package management on Debian based systems, its a powerful suite of tools for getting and managing packages onto the system.
As powerful as the Apt suite is, it has problems as I found out this week working through a proxy server. Something i’ve recently implemented.
There are Three ways for doing this:
Temporary proxy session
This is a temporary method that you can manually use each time you want to use apt-get through a http-proxy. This method is useful if you only want to temporarily use a http-proxy.
Enter this line in the terminal prior to using apt-get (substitute your details for yourproxyaddress and proxyport).
export http_proxy=http://yourproxyaddress:proxyport
APT configuration file method
This method uses the apt.conf file which is found in your /etc/apt/ directory. This method is useful if you only want apt-get (and not other applications) to use a http-proxy permanently.
On some installations there will be no apt-conf file set up. This procedure will either edit an existing apt-conf file or create a new apt-conf file.
gksudo gedit /etc/apt/apt.conf
Add this line to your /etc/apt/apt.conf file (substitute your details for yourproxyaddress and proxyport).
Acquire::http::Proxy "http://yourproxyaddress:proxyport";
Save the apt.conf file.
BASH rc method
This method adds a two lines to your .bashrc file in your $HOME directory. This method is useful if you would like apt-get and other applications for instance wget, to use a http-proxy.
gedit ~/.bashrc
Add these lines to the bottom of your ~/.bashrc file (substitute your details for yourproxyaddress and proxyport)
http_proxy=http://yourproxyaddress:proxyport
export http_proxy
Save the file. Close your terminal window and then open another terminal window or source the ~/.bashrc file:
source ~/.bashrc
Test your proxy with sudo apt-get update and whatever networking tool you desire. You can use firestarter or conky to see active connections.
If you make a mistake and go back to edit the file again, you can close the terminal and reopen it or you can source~/.bashrc as shown above.
source ~/.bashrc
If you don’t want to go through the proxy for certain addresses, use the no_proxy variable. This is a comma-separated list of domains which you do not want resolved via the proxy. Unfortunately wild cards are not supported (so you can’t just put 192.168.* 😦 ) and the maximum number of entries in this list is 16. Here is an example:
export no_proxy="192.168.0.1,localdomain"Of course, the proxy settings will be forgotten when you log out. To make the proxy setting a little more permanent, you can set your proxy variables in /etc/profile
Something I did notice with all of this however was if you use sudo with a command the sudo command may throw up a wobbly. To get round this..
Instead of setting sudo proxy using export command try this
sudo visudo
Then add the following line
Defaults env_keep += “ftp_proxy http_proxy https_proxy”
This will ensure that your normal users values will be inherited by sudo
As a final side note, the http_proxy works with wget too, and any command launched from the terminal including gui apps running from the command line.
