CPAN behind a proxy, ugh.

Jay Lucky — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 22:10:59 +0000

So, it took me awhile to get CPAN to work behind the proxy at work. Part of the problem was that I needed to authenticate to the proxy with my Active Directory credentials, which is simple in theory, but ended up being more complicated than I thought originally. I started out by specifying my proxy information in the CPAN setup, but that failed with an authentication error. It never once asked me for my credentials, which struck me as odd, since it clearly states that if you do not specify them, you will be asked.

So then I tried the environment variables, http_proxy and ftp_proxy with the proper syntax. I figured this would work, and in my testing, did from the command line, however for some reason it would not from within CPAN itself; which I imagine is because CPAN sets it’s own environment variables on execution.

Perplexed, I thought I would try creating .wgetrc file in my home directory and see if that worked. It did. Wonderfully, in fact. This seems to have solved the problem. All you need to do is create the file with the following in it:

http_proxy=http://DOMAIN\USERNAME:PASSWORD@PROXY:PORT ftp_proxy=ftp://DOMAIN\USERNAME:PASSWORD@PROXY:PORT use_proxy = on

Next time you run CPAN, it will automagically connect to your proxy, authenticate, and then initiate the download, as per norm!

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CPAN behind a proxy, ugh.