Emacs Proxy

February 5, 2024

Proxy servers are commonly used to provide gateways through firewalls or as caches serving some more-or-less local network. Each protocol (HTTP, FTP, etc.) can have a different gateway server. Proxying is conventionally configured commonly amongst different programs through environment variables of the form protocol-proxy, where protocol is one of the supported network protocols (http, ftp, etc.). The library recognized such variables in either upper or lower case.

System Proxy

export http_proxy=http://username:password@proxy.xxx.com:8080
export https_proxy=${http_proxy}

URL Proxy Services

Proxies are supported by URL package, by setting url-proxy-services to an assoc list mapping url services and the proxy servers that support them.

(setq url-proxy-services
      '(("http"     . "proxy.example.com:8080")
        ("https"    . "proxy.example.com:8080")
          ("no_proxy" . "^.*example.com")))

If the proxy services need to be authorized, we need to customize url-http-proxy-basic-auth-storage.

(setq url-http-proxy-basic-auth-storage
      (list (list "proxy.example.com:8080"
                  (cons "Input your LDAP UID !"
                        (base64-encode-string "LOGIN:PASSWORD")))))

Socks Proxy

Enable socks proxy:

(setq url-gateway-method 'socks
      socks-server '("Default Server" "socks.proxy.com" 1080 5)
      socks-noproxy '("localhost"))

If the socks-server need to be authorized, socks-username and socks-password need to be customized.

Disable socks proxy:

(setq url-gateway-method 'native
      socks-server nil
      socks-noproxy nil)