Using pip behind a proxy

Question

I am trying to use pip behind a proxy at work.

One of the answers from this post suggested using CNTLM. I installed and configured it per this other post, but running cntlm.exe -c cntlm.ini -I -M http://google.com gave the error Connection to proxy failed, bailing out.

I also tried pip install -–proxy=user:pass@localhost:3128 (the default CNTLM port) but that raised Cannot fetch index base URL http://pypi.python.org/simple/. Clearly something's up with the proxy.

Does anyone know how to check more definitively whether CNTLM is set up right, or if there's another way around this altogether? I know you can also set the http_proxy environment variable as described here but I'm not sure what credentials to put in. The ones from cntlm.ini?

Answer 1

for windows; set your proxy in command prompt as
set HTTP_PROXY=domain\username:password@myproxy:myproxyport

example:
set http_proxy=IND\namit.kewat:xl123456@192.168.180.150:8880

Answer 2

I am also no expert in this but I made it work by setting the all_proxy variable in the ~/.bashrc file. To open ~/.bashrc file and edit it from a terminal run following commands,

gedit ~/.bashrc &

Add following at the end of file,

export all_proxy="http://x.y.z.w:port"

Then either open a new terminal or run following in the same terminal,

source ~/.bashrc

Just setting http_proxy and https_proxy variables aren't enough for simple usage pip install somepackage. Though somehow sudo -E pip install somepackage works, but this have given me some problem in case I am using a local installation of Anaconda in my users' folder.

P.S. - I am using Ubuntu 16.04.

Answer 3

This is what works for me:

pip --proxy proxy url:port command package

Answer 4

I got the error:

chris@green:~$ sudo http_proxy=http://localhost:3128 pip install django==1.8.8 
Downloading/unpacking django==1.8.8
  Cannot fetch index base URL http://pypi.python.org/simple/
  Could not find any downloads that satisfy the requirement django==1.8.8
No distributions at all found for django==1.8.8
Storing complete log in /home/chris/.pip/pip.log

(The proxy server's port is ssh port forwarded to localhost:3128).

I had to set both http and https proxies to make it work:

chris@green:~$ sudo http_proxy=http://localhost:3128 https_proxy=http://localhost:3128 pip install django==1.8.8
Downloading/unpacking django==1.8.8
  Downloading Django-1.8.8.tar.gz (7.3Mb): 7.3Mb downloaded
  Running setup.py egg_info for package django

    warning: no previously-included files matching '__pycache__' found under directory '*'
    warning: no previously-included files matching '*.py[co]' found under directory '*'
Installing collected packages: django
  Running setup.py install for django

    warning: no previously-included files matching '__pycache__' found under directory '*'
    warning: no previously-included files matching '*.py[co]' found under directory '*'
    changing mode of build/scripts-2.7/django-admin.py from 644 to 755
    changing mode of /usr/local/bin/django-admin.py to 755
    Installing django-admin script to /usr/local/bin
Successfully installed django
Cleaning up...

as http://pypi.python.org/simple/ redirects to https://pypi.python.org/simple but pip's error does not tell you.

Answer 5

You can continue to use pip over HTTPS by adding your corporation's root certificate to the cacert.pem file in your site-packages/pip folder. Then configure pip to use your proxy by adding the following lines to ~/pip/pip.conf (or ~\pip\pip.ini if you're on Windows):

[global]
proxy = [user:passwd@]proxy.server:port

That's it. No need to use third party packages or give up HTTPS (of course, your network admin can still see what you're doing).

Answer 6

Warning, there is something very bad with the "pip search" command. The search command do not use the proxy setting regardless of the way it's being passed.

I was trying to figure out the problem only trying the "search" command, and found this post with detailed explanation about that bug: https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/1104

I can confirm the bug remains with pip 1.5.6 on Debian 8 with python 2.7.9. The "pip install" command works like a charm.