Configuring Raspberry Pis to use a Proxy server

If you find yourself in a network that requires a proxy server set up... good luck. We had problems with MQTT that we weren't able to resolve but everything else worked.

Here's some steps to get you going. We started from the Raspberry Pi documentation, but tried to switch to as few manual steps as possible so we could run round the classroom to configure everyone!

Replace http://192.168.32.3:3128 with whatever the appropriate proxy server configuration is for your network.

Note that in our case the HTTPS proxy deliberately uses HTTP to access the proxy server - we got SSL3 protocol errors when trying to download the Heroku CLI otherwise.

1. Create a file called environment with the following contents

   export http_proxy="http://192.168.32.3:3128"
   export https_proxy="http://192.168.32.3:3128"
   export no_proxy="localhost, 127.0.0.1"
   

2. Run sudo cp environment /etc (in our Raspberry Pis the environment files were empty)

3. Run sudo visudo

4. Add the line below to the file and save

   Defaults    env_keep+="http_proxy https_proxy no_proxy"
   

5. For some reason Git ignores these, so we need to configure too - run these commands:

   git config --global http.proxy http://192.168.32.3:3128
   git config --global https.proxy http://192.168.32.3:3128
   

6. Run 'sudo reboot' (to restart)