Make "auto-proxy" use HTTP_PROXY environment variable on *NIX platforms

[Samuli Seppänen]

Currently "auto-proxy" only supports Windows. *NIX systems often store HTTP proxy settings in an environment variable called HTTP_PROXY. It would be beneficial if "auto-proxy" would detect this environment variable and use it to define proxy settings automatically.

[Samuli Seppänen]

This feature request was originally from Jason Haar and was discussed in the IRC meeting on July 8th (see ​https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/IrcMeetings).

The name of the variable can also be in lowercase ("http_proxy").

For further information about HTTP_PROXY variable see these links:

• ​http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-set-proxy-environment-variable
• ​http://www.ivorde.ro/Setting_up_HTTP_PROXY_via_command_line_in_Linux_FreeBSD-107.html

[Emmanuel Bretelle]

Another way to detect proxy settings for users using graphical sessions could be through gconf with keys:

$ gconftool-2 -a /system/proxy

autoconfig_url =
ftp_port = 0
mode = none
secure_port = 0
secure_host =
socks_host =
socks_port = 0
ftp_host =

$ gconftool-2 -a /system/http_proxy

use_http_proxy = false
port = 8080
authentication_password =
authentication_user =
host =
use_authentication = false
ignore_hosts = [localhost,127.0.0.0/8,*.local]

Also, these might be interesting pointers:

• ​http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/b00bb3a115de/toolkit/system/unixproxy/nsUnixSystemProxySettings.cpp
• ​http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/b00bb3a115de/toolkit/system/

[David Sommerseth]

The --auto-proxy feature has been removed from OpenVPN and will be processed in the GUIs. The GUI (or another OpenVPN front-end) which is specially designed for a particular user environment will know better how to extract this information, rather than the core OpenVPN needing to support each environment separately.