How to connect a socket to an http server through proxy?

Question

Recently I wrote a program using sockets in C, to connect to an HTTP server running locally and thereby to do requests to that.

That worked fine for me. After that I tried the same code to connect to another server on the web (e.g. www.google.com), but I was not able to connect and was getting another html response from the proxy server in my network.

• My local IP is: 10.0.2.58
• The proxy IP is: 10.0.0.1

This is the response I got :

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Expires: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:47:35 GMT
Expires: 0
Cache-Control: max-age=180000
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate
Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Connection: close
Location: http://10.0.0.1:8000/index.php?redirurl=http%3A%2F%2F10.0.2.58%2F
Content-type: text/html
Content-Length: 0
Date: Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:47:35 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.4.29

How can I bypass this proxy to connect to external servers?

---

Response got when tried with CONNECT

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Expires: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:37:58 GMT
Expires: 0
Cache-Control: max-age=180000
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate
Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Connection: close
Location: http://10.0.0.1:8000/index.php?redirurl=http%3A%2F%2F10.0.2.58http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F
Content-type: text/html
Content-Length: 0
Date: Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:37:58 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.4.29

---

Working code which connect's to my local apache

#include<unistd.h>
#include<stdio.h>
#include<sys/types.h>
#include<sys/socket.h>
#include<netinet/in.h>
#include<arpa/inet.h>
#include<netdb.h>
#include<string.h>

#define MAX_BUFFER_SIZE 1024

int main(int argc,char *argv[])
{
  int clsd,ssd,status;
  char buffer[1024];
  char request[]="GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost:10.0.2.58\r\n\r\n";
  struct sockaddr_in srvr_addr;

  struct addrinfo hints,*res;

  srvr_addr.sin_family=AF_INET;
  srvr_addr.sin_port=htons(80);
  srvr_addr.sin_addr.s_addr=inet_addr("10.0.2.58");//Local server

  clsd =socket(AF_INET,SOCK_STREAM,IPPROTO_TCP);
  if(clsd<=0)
  {
        perror("Socket init failed..\n");return 1;
  }
  ssd=connect(clsd,(struct sockaddr *)&srvr_addr,(socklen_t)(sizeof srvr_addr));
  if(clsd<=0)
  {
        perror("Socket connect failed..\n");return 1;
  }
  write(clsd,request,strlen(request));
  memset((void *)&request,0x00,strlen(request));
  memset(&buffer,0x00,MAX_BUFFER_SIZE);

 do
 {
  status=read(clsd,&buffer,MAX_BUFFER_SIZE);
  write(1,&buffer,status);
 memset((void *)&request,0x00,strlen(request));
  memset(&buffer,0x00,MAX_BUFFER_SIZE);

 do
 {
  status=read(clsd,&buffer,MAX_BUFFER_SIZE);
  write(1,&buffer,status);
 }while(status>0);
 close(clsd); 
 return 0;
}

Answer 1

To use connections via proxy (or if they are implicitly proxy-fied), first you should connect to proxy, send a 'CONNECT' message with target host; proxy will establish connection and return you data.

Here is in steps:

1. open socket to proxy host
2. send 'CONNECT http://www.google.com:80 HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n' string
3. wait for recv

You must specify protocol (in our case is HTTP 1.0, non-chunked) with ending newline characters, so proxy knows how to communicate with end point.

You can find details about CONNECT method at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2817.txt