package-refresh-contents hangs at Contacting host: elpa.gnu.org:80

Question

I'm running Emacs 24.4 for Windows (installed through Chocolatey) and trying to install CIDER.

When I run M-x package-install [RET] cider [RET], I get [No match]. When I run M-x package-refresh-contents [RET], it hangs on Contacting host: elpa.gnu.org:80.

~/.emacs.d is populated with the GitHub repo recommended by braveclojure.com (here). I've reinstalled Emacs and I'm still getting the same problem.

Answer 1

I had this same problem on emacs ELPA wiki they say to set un ELPA you have to modify the emacs init file located at ~/.emacs or _emacs or ~/.emacs.d/init.el for me it was ~/.emacs-live.el since I have this version.

I just updated that file with the following:

(setq package-archives '(("gnu" . "http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/")                      ("marmalade" . "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/")                      ("melpa" . "http://melpa.org/packages/"))) 

Seems that I needed the configuration from where ELPA is going to look for packages.

After that i just ran M-x package-refresh-contents [RET] and M-x package-install [RET] cider [RET] that installed cider.

---

Answer 2

This guide fixed it for me: http://www.lonecpluspluscoder.com/2015/08/adding-tls-support-to-emacs-24-5-on-windows/

Basically go to: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/, grab the gnutls library and just uncompress the archive at the root of your Emacs directory.

Afterwards, doing list-packages became near-instant for me. Using Emacs 24.5.1.