Proxy-auto-discovery for command line applications (pac4cli)

Introduction

On many corporate networks, applications need proxy-auto-discovery to know whether a certain URL is accessed either directly or through a web proxy. Browsers can typically handle this, but many command line applications (git, npm, apt, curl) rely on environment variable to hard-code a proxy regardless of the destination URL.

This little daemon enables these applications for auto-discovery by:

• setting the http_proxy variable (and friends) to http://localhost:3128
• providing a simple proxy at that port that does proxy-auto-discovery and connects accordingly.

System dependencies:

• systemd
• NetworkManager

Python library dependencies from PyPI can be installed through:

sudo pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Installation instructions

Ubuntu

The latest builds are available through a PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tkluck/pac4cli
sudo apt update
sudo apt install pac4cli

You'll need to restart your shell for the new environment variables to take effect.

This will install pac4cli for most of your command line tools. However, we don't ship configuration for Apt. If you want to use pac4cli for software updates, you'll need to run the following:

sudo tee /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99pac4cli <<CONFIG
Acquire::http::proxy "http://localhost:3128/";
Acquire::https::proxy "http://localhost:3128/";
# The following are needed to work around limitations
# in pac4cli's support of http features:
Acquire::http::No-Cache true;
Acquire::http::Pipeline-Depth 0;
CONFIG

The reason why this is not included in the Ubuntu package is that if pac4cli ever breaks, we could not ship an update to unbreak it.

Archlinux

This package is available in AUR.

Other (Mac, other linuxes)

The dependencies can be installed through

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Then, use

make install

Just python setup.py install is not sufficient. That will only install the pac4cli module, but not the binary or the configuration files.