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How can I set up "curl" to permanently use a proxy server in the terminal?

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    why was this question closed? seems quite important to me... Commented Jul 8, 2013 at 15:40
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    I suspect it was considered off topic because it did not explicitly mention how cURL was being used in a programming problem (e.g. writing a script to do something interesting). It might have just as well been formulated as a sysadmin question better suited to ServerFault. Commented Aug 10, 2015 at 20:56
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    stackoverflow.com/questions/9445489/… Commented Nov 14, 2016 at 8:42

4 Answers 4

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206

You can make a alias in your ~/.bashrc file :

alias curl="curl -x <proxy_host>:<proxy_port>"

Another solution is to use (maybe the better solution) the ~/.curlrc file (create it if it does not exist) :

proxy = <proxy_host>:<proxy_port>
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5 Comments

Setting the proxy in ~/.curlrc has saved me many painful hours when working from within a corporate proxy. Thanks!
what about user:pass auth to that?
You could try the format username:password@proxy:port.
If anyone comes along and is trying to accomplish this with Windows / DOSKEY, I used alias curl=curl --proxy <proxy server:port> $*
Worked on Ubuntu 20 as well
52

Many UNIX programs respect the http_proxy environment variable, curl included. The format curl accepts is [protocol://]<host>[:port].

In your shell configuration:

export http_proxy http://proxy.server.com:3128

For proxying HTTPS requests, set https_proxy as well.

Curl also allows you to set this in your .curlrc file (_curlrc on Windows), which you might consider more permanent:

http_proxy=http://proxy.server.com:3128
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env variable did not work for me (in Terminal on a mac).
To proxy HTTPS traffic on mac, setting the https_proxy env variable in the terminal before invoking curl, worked for me. For example, export https_proxy=https://proxy.server.com:6443
Also note that setting HTTP_PROXY/HTTPS_PROXY (uppercase) does not work, but setting http_proxy/https_proxy (lowercase) does.
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Curl will look for a .curlrc file in your home folder when it starts. You can create (or edit) this file and add this line:

proxy = yourproxy.com:8080
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This works on Ubuntu 16.04. It should be accepted answer for that OS.
Can confirm it worked for Ubuntu 20 as well.
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One notice. On Windows, place your _curlrc in '%APPDATA%' or '%USERPROFILE%\Application Data'.

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Unfortunately, this did not work for me.

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