Is there any way of configuring Eclipse IDE proxy settings via an autoproxy configuration script?

Question

I am behind a firewall which uses autoproxy configuration script. I am able to browse the internet when I enable the autoproxy url in most browsers I use (IE 7, IE 8, FF, Chrome). For your reference to enable autoproxy url on Windows goto: Settings -> Control Panel -> Internet Options -> Connections -> Lan Settings -> (Check) use automatic configuration scripts -> enter Address value as the autoproxy script url.

The issue I am facing is: I have Eclipse IDE and I want to configure the proxy settings in Eclipse similar to browser settings but I am unable to. I could not find a setting in Eclipse or NetBeans 6.9.1 or IntelliJ Idea to solve this issue.

I am using Maven2 integrated with these IDEs and no local repositories set up yet. Maven2 tries to install jars by downloading them from Internet but it cannot due to the proxy setting. I can manually download these libraries from Maven2 repositories and have an internal repository hosted using Artifactory or Nexus but I would like to know if there is any way I can do it from IDE itself...

Thanks for your feedback. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Answer 1

Here is what I do. All of these instructions are based on my minimal experiences with working PACs, so YMMV.

Download your pac file via your pac URL. It's plain text and should be easy to open in a text editor.

Near the bottom, there's probably a section that says something like: return "PROXY w.x.y.z:a" where "w.x.y.z" is an ip address or username and "a" is a port number.

Write these down.

In a recent version of eclipse :

• Go to Window -> Preferences -> General -> Network Connections=
• Change the provider to "Manual"
• Select the "HTTP" line and click the edit button
• Add the IP address and port number above to the http line
• If you have to authenticate to use the proxy,
  • select "Requires Authentication"
  • type in your username. Note that if your authentication is on a Windows domain, you might have to prepend the domain name and a backslash (\) like: MYDOMAIN\MYUSERID
  • Type in your password
• Click OK
• Click Apply
• Click OK

At this point, you should be able to browse using the internal web browser (at least on http URLs).

Good luck.

Edit: Just so you know, it's WAY easier to use Nexus, one set of <mirror> tags and a single proxy setup (inside Nexus) to manage the proxy issues of Maven inside a firewall.

Answer 2

In the file: $your_eclipse_installation\configuration.settings\org.eclipse.core.net.prefs

you need the option: systemProxiesEnabled=true

You can set it also by the Eclipse GUI: Go to Window -> Preferences -> General -> Network Connections Change the provider to "Native"

The first way is working even if your Eclipse is broken due to wrong configuration attempts.