I need to set up proxy authentication against a SOCKS proxy.
I found out this post giving instructions that appear to work with common HTTP proxies.
httpclient.getHostConfiguration().setProxy("proxyserver.example.com", 8080);
HttpState state = new HttpState();
state.setProxyCredentials(new AuthScope("proxyserver.example.com", 8080),
new UsernamePasswordCredentials("username", "password"));
httpclient.setState(state);
Would that work with SOCKS proxies as well or do I have to do something different?
The Features page of Apache HTTPClient says:
Transparent connections through SOCKS proxies (version 4 & 5) using native Java socket support.
With "transparent", I guess they mean that it works without you needing to do anything special. Do you have a SOCKS proxy available somewhere? Can't you just try it out to see if it works?
Java supports Socks proxy configuration via preferences:
socksProxyHost
for the host name of the SOCKS proxy server
socksProxyPort
for the port number, the default value being 1080
e.g.
java -DsocksProxyHost=socks.mydomain.com
(edit) For your example, if the socks proxy was configured in the way outlined before:
httpclient.getHostConfiguration().setProxy("proxyserver.example.com", 8080);
Credentials cred = new UsernamePasswordCredentials("username","password");
httpclient.getState().setProxyCredentials(AuthScope.ANY, cred);
You can also use this variant (without httpclient):
SocketAddress addr = new
InetSocketAddress("webcache.mydomain.com", 8080);
Proxy proxy = new Proxy(Proxy.Type.SOCKS, addr); // Type.HTTP for HTTP
So completing the previous example, we can now add:
URL url = new URL("http://java.sun.com/");
URConnection conn = url.openConnection(proxy);
HTH
SOCKS is not supported by HttpClient 3 natively. You can try the SOCKS support in JDK as suggested by others. The side effect is that your whole JVM will go through the same SOCKS proxy.
Java 5 supports Username/Password authentication in SOCKS (type 2). All you have to do is to setup the authenticator like this,
Authenticator.setDefault(new Authenticator() {
protected PasswordAuthentication getPasswordAuthentication() {
return new PasswordAuthentication(username, password.toCharArray());
}
});
Again, this may not work for you because it affects all authentication in your JVM (HTTP auth, Proxy Auth).
You can provide a custom socket factory which implements the SOCKS protocol, and register it as your default HTTP protocol handler. This solution has a limitation similar to tuergeist's answer above has - it applies globally, to any HTTP connection you'll establish through HttpClient.
If you find this a problem, take a look at this correspondence, where Oleg suggests using HttpClient 4.0, but also refers to a possible patch in HostConfiguration class for HttpClient 3.x.
Another possible solution, which is my personal favorite, is to write a wrapper HTTP proxy to the socks proxy.
I tried
System.setProperty("socksProxyHost", "socks.xyz.com");
System.setProperty("socksProxyPort", "1000");
and it's working fine.