3.7 KiB
Proxy Server
Under the hood, n uses curl or wget for the downloads. curl is used if available, and wget otherwise. Both curl and wget support using environment variables or startup files to set up the proxy.
Using Environment Variable
You can define the proxy server using an environment variable, which is read by multiple commands including curl and wget:
export https_proxy='https://host:port/path'
If your proxy requires authentication you can add the url-encoded username and password into the URL. e.g.
export https_proxy='https://encoded-user:encoded-password@host:port/path'
If you have defined a custom node mirror which uses http, then you would define http_proxy rather than https_proxy.
If you use sudo to run n, you need to do something extra to make the environment variables available. A simple way is to use -E (--preserve-env):
sudo -E n lts
Certificate Checks
Your proxy server may supply its own ssl certificates for remote sites (as a man-in-the-middle). If you can not arrange to trust the proxy in this role, you can turn off (all) certificate checking with --insecure. e.g.
n --insecure --lts
Another possible work-around for certificate problems is to use plain http by specifying a custom node mirror:
export NODE_MIRROR='http://nodejs.org/dist'
export http_proxy='http://host:port/path'
n --lts
Startup Files
An alternative to using an environment variable for the proxy settings is to configure a startup file for the command.
Example ~/.curlrc (documentation)
proxy = http://host:port/path
proxy-user = user:password
# If need to disable certificate checks
--insecure
Example ~/.wgetrc (documentation)
https_proxy = http://host:port/path
proxy_user = user
proxy_password = password
# If need to disable certificate checks
check_certificate = off
Troubleshooting
To experiment and find what settings you need, use curl (or wget) directly with the node mirror and check the error messages.
For these examples there is a proxy running on localhost:8080 which does not require authentication, but the certificates it offers are not trusted.
First try fails because of the certificates and curl helpfully explains:
$ curl --proxy localhost:8080 https://nodejs.org/dist/
curl: (60) SSL certificate problem: self signed certificate in certificate chain
...
If you'd like to turn off curl's verification of the certificate, use
the -k (or --insecure) option.
HTTPS-proxy has similar options --proxy-cacert and --proxy-insecure.
Once you get the command to work with settings appropriate for your setup, like:
$ curl --insecure --proxy localhost:8080 https://nodejs.org/dist/
<html>
<head><title>Index of /dist/</title></head>
...
then you can try moving the proxy out of the command:
$ https_proxy=localhost:8080 curl --insecure https://nodejs.org/dist/
<html>
<head><title>Index of /dist/</title></head>
...
and then n should work the same way:
$ https_proxy=localhost:8080 n --insecure --lts
8.11.3
To make it permanent either add settings to the curl (or wget) startup file, or add the
environment variable to your shell initialization file . e.g.
export https_proxy=localhost:8080
For curl, two options of note for debugging are:
-v, --verbose
Makes curl verbose during the operation. Useful for debugging and seeing what's going on "under the hood". ...
-q, --disable
If used as the first parameter on the command line, the curlrc config file will not be read and used. ...