From: Erik Wessel <wesselej@...>
Date: 2005-11-12T02:27:14+09:00
Subject: Proxy Authentication in open-uri

This is the first time I've posted, so bear with me if I defy any
conventions.

A problem I've run into a couple times while writing programs for
myself at work (and using Ruby Gems, as well) has been that our company
uses an authenticating proxy.  There's apparently no way to cleanly
write something that authenticates to a proxy with open-uri.  I found a
post on this group by Tanaka Akira saying that open-uri doesn't have
that functionality because he's not sure how to encode the user/pass
correctly.  There's a quick work-around that I've discovered, having
this problem with a lot of programming I've done here at work.

The encoding is a simple base64 encoding, with the right syntax in a
header on the request:

Authorization: Basic <base64 encoded string "name:pass">

This is for basic HTTP proxies.  I have no idea how it works on other
proxies, like SOCKS.

So, to get open-uri to work you could do something ugly like:

*****
require 'open-uri'
require 'base64'

open("http://some.web-site.tld",
:proxy => "http://my.http-proxy.tld",
"Authorization" => "Basic " << Base64.encode64("user:pass")) do |page|
     puts page.read
end
*****

However I've hacked at open-uri.rb a little (and I mean *hacked*, with
an axe), and come up with this:

diff 1.8/open-uri.rb site_ruby/1.8/open-uri.rb
97a98,99
>       :proxy_user => true,
>       :proxy_pass => true
101a104
>       new_options = {}
106a110,121
>         if ((k == :proxy_user) && !options.keys().include?("Authorization")) then
>               unless options.keys().member?(:proxy_pass) then
>                 raise ArgumentError, ":proxy_pass needs to be defined"
>               end
>               new_options = OpenURI.basic_auth(options[:proxy_user],options[:proxy_pass])
>         end
>         if ((k == :proxy_pass) && !options.keys().include?("Authorization")) then
>               unless options.keys().member?(:proxy_user) then
>                 raise ArgumentError, ":proxy_user needs to be defined"
>               end
>               new_options = OpenURI.basic_auth(options[:proxy_user],options[:proxy_pass])
>         end
107a123,128
>       options.update(new_options)
>   end
>
>   def OpenURI.basic_auth(username,password)
>     require 'base64'
>       {"Authorization" => "Basic " << Base64.encode64("#{username}:#{password}")}

Applying these changes to the open-uri.rb file, you can now do this:


*****
require 'open-uri'

open("http://some.web-site.tld",
:proxy => "http://my.http-proxy.tld",
:proxy_user => "user",
:proxy_pass => "pass") do |page|
     puts page.read
end
*****

I hope this helps those of you out there who need to get through an
authenticating proxy.

--Erik