Update status behind a proxy

Question

I'm running Drupal in an intranet which is behind a simple HTTP proxy. I'd like for the module and core update checks to actually work.

I seem to remember there was a core hack to do this on Drupal 6, but I can't find the page anymore.

Does anyone know how I can get this working?

Answer 1

One of our corporate installations had a forward proxy that prevented direct access to the internet, we ended up patching core with 'the proxy patch' (thus named this way because this issue has been open since 2004 - http://drupal.org/node/7881).

http://drupal.org/node/7881#comment-4134240 - has a patch for drupal 7 http://drupal.org/node/7881#comment-2446280 - has a patch for drupal 6

Once the patch is installed, then you will be able to alter drupal_http_request() to send all queries through the proxy.

This way all modules that require access to the internet will function as expected, e.g. update statue, aggregator, openID etc

UPDATE: The patch is already merged in Drupal 7 trunk ( https://drupal.org/comment/6425278#comment-6425278 ), and hopefully will be out with Drupal 7.16

Answer 2

For reference, this is the syntax you can now use in Drupal to configure it to run behind a proxy (from default.settings.php/7):

/**
 * External access proxy settings:
 *
 * If your site must access the Internet via a web proxy then you can enter
 * the proxy settings here. Currently only basic authentication is supported
 * by using the username and password variables. The proxy_user_agent variable
 * can be set to NULL for proxies that require no User-Agent header or to a
 * non-empty string for proxies that limit requests to a specific agent. The
 * proxy_exceptions variable is an array of host names to be accessed directly,
 * not via proxy.
 */
# $conf['proxy_server'] = '';
# $conf['proxy_port'] = 8080;
# $conf['proxy_username'] = '';
# $conf['proxy_password'] = '';
# $conf['proxy_user_agent'] = '';
# $conf['proxy_exceptions'] = array('127.0.0.1', 'localhost');

Answer 3

There's a module for that ™

It's currently only Drupal 6, but should provide a good starting point.

Answer 4

For resolving staging pbs, I'm working locally with the real production domain name, but behind a proxy, so that drupal installation and web server configuration are strictly identical (on some conf the IP listening could be different, depending on the listening ip in production).

So, I had a proxy responding for http://mydomain.local, proxying to http://www.mydomain.tld, but on a local IP.

Whith nginx, in local vhost conf :

server_name  mydomain.local;
set $proxied_server_name www.mydomain.tld;
set $proxied_cookie_domain mydomain.tld;

# then generic proxy conf
proxy_set_header Host              $proxied_server_name;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP         $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For   $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

# My param added for drupal absolute url construction
proxy_set_header X-Proxy-Host      $host;               

# For headers rewriting (Location or Refresh)
proxy_redirect   http://$proxied_server_name/ http://$host/;

proxy_cookie_domain $proxied_server_name $host;  
# and for drupal auth, with cookies without sub-domain
proxy_cookie_domain $proxied_cookie_domain $host;

For the proxied vhost, just like in production

server_name  www.mydomain.tld;

And in my settings.php

if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_PROXY_HOST'])) {
  $base_url = 'http://' .$_SERVER['HTTP_X_PROXY_HOST'];
}

With this conf, I can sync all drupal files AND database AND server configuration between a lot of drupal installation (dev and production in my case but could be whatever you want).