[chef] Ruby, Chef, proxies

[Justin Dossey < >]

Hi all,

I work at a place that requires that I use a proxy to access the Internet. 

Support for proxies in Ruby stuff is uneven, probably because most people don't have to support proxies.

I wrote a script to test different methods of GETting a public page in Ruby.  It addresses the questions:

• Does this method respect the http_proxy (or HTTP_PROXY) environment variable?
• If it does, does it respect the no_proxy (or NO_PROXY) environment variable?

Here's a gist of the code:

https://gist.github.com/justindossey/7c6e0a62ec34ce0bf317

The output on my system is posted as a comment.

I'd love to see other clients in here! I tried to stick to stuff that was installed via ChefDK.

A couple of things I want to highlight about the test:

• In ruby's standard Net::HTTP, the way you perform the request strongly influences whether your proxy is respected.  Net::HTTP.get_request and Net::HTTP.get do not honor proxies.  Even Net::HTTP.start() doesn't honor your proxy.  You have to do Net::HTTP.new().start in order to get proxy support.
• open-uri is proxy-friendly (but you give up a bit of control of request headers, etc)
• Ruby doesn't honor wildcards in the no_proxy or NO_PROXY environment variable.  Chef, however, does (in Chef::HTTP::BasicClient).
• I didn't test Chef::HTTP::BasicClient because my test runs outside of Chef, but I'm pretty sure it does the right thing.

If you want to run this, you need:

1. ChefDK, or have the HTTP and Faraday gems installed;
   
2. A Proxy server to use
   

--

Justin Dossey

Practice Owner

New Context Services, Inc