apt-get behind proxy on VirtualBox Ubuntu

Question

how can I set apt-get to work behind proxy?

Answer 1

http_proxy="http://host:port" apt-get something

should work.

If you require authentication, try

http_proxy="http://user:pass@host:port" apt-get something

And if you want this to be permenant, you should probably set the http_proxy (and ftp_proxy?) variables in your ~/.bashrc so that all of your proxy-capable applications will work in the future, e.g. 'wget'.

Answer 2

in /etc/apt/apt.conf, add the line:

Acquire::http::Proxy "http://MYDOMAIN\MYNAME:[email protected]:MYPORT"

From: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=96802

(Note: completely stolen from this answer to my similar question on SF. Cred to Grizzly)

Answer 3

A proxy is specified by setting the http_proxy, ftp_proxy and all_proxy environment variables, either locally (e.g. in ~/.bashrc) or globally (e.g. in /etc/bash.bashrc). These settings are honored by virtually all net-software packages (like apt-get, wget, curl etc.):

# HTTP proxy without authentification
export http_proxy="http://host:port"
# HTTP proxy with authentification
export http_proxy="http://user:pass@host:port"

However, setting them this way does not help when running sudo apt-get ... - and that is due to this line in /etc/sudoers:

Defaults env_reset

This line resets all environment variables when using sudo, for security reasons. In order to keep the values of http_proxy etc. in a sudo invocation, you can specify exceptions to env_reset via env_keep:

# Exception specific to the command apt-get
Defaults!/usr/bin/apt-get env_keep="http_proxy https_proxy ftp_proxy"
# Exception specific to the user joe
Defaults:joe env_keep="http_proxy https_proxy ftp_proxy"

This way, you get apt-get to honor the global setting for http_proxy, instead of duplicating the setting for apt-get in some arcane apt-specific config file.