Using HTTPProxy in Net/HTTP globally.

There comes a time when you want to Proxy your Net/HTTP request/response in Ruby.

One of the easy ways to do this in NET/HTTP is by passing proxy parameters in '.new'  method (during initialization)

proxy_addr = 'your.proxy.host'
proxy_port = 8080

Net::HTTP.new('example.com', nil, proxy_addr, proxy_port).start { |http|
  # always proxy via your.proxy.addr:8080
}

Obviously, this works but then querying the website using GET or GET BY URI method there is no provision to pass any proxy parameters altogether(at least that's what I found out.)

Thankfully Ruby-2.0+ (not available in lower versions though, can be seen over here) has a feature with which you can provide proxy as your ENV variable (http_proxy environment variable) and ruby take care of the rest.

So, upon setting  http_proxy in ENV I found, BAAM!!!  it worked and it worked globally (i.e it works even on GET and GET BY URL methods mentioned above.)

BTW, I had the following declaration inside my .bash_profile.

export http_proxy= 'http://127.0.0.1:8080'  (8080 is the port where my Squid Proxy is functional)

Thanks