How do I set the proxy to be used by the JVM

Question

Many times, a Java app needs to connect to the Internet. The most common example happens when it is reading an XML file and needs to download its schema.

I am behind

Answer 1

reading an XML file and needs to download its schema

If you are counting on retrieving schemas or DTDs over the internet, you're building a slow, chatty, fragile application. What happens when that remote server hosting the file takes planned or unplanned downtime? Your app breaks. Is that OK?

See http://xml.apache.org/commons/components/resolver/resolver-article.html#s.catalog.files

URL's for schemas and the like are best thought of as unique identifiers. Not as requests to actually access that file remotely. Do some google searching on "XML catalog". An XML catalog allows you to host such resources locally, resolving the slowness, chattiness and fragility.

It's basically a permanently cached copy of the remote content. And that's OK, since the remote content will never change. If there's ever an update, it'd be at a different URL. Making the actual retrieval of the resource over the internet especially silly.

Answer 2

As is pointed out in other answers, if you need to use Authenticated proxies, there's no reliable way to do this purely using command-line variables - which is annoying if you're using someone else's application and don't want to mess with the source code.

Will Iverson makes the helpful suggestion over at Using HttpProxy to connect to a host with preemtive authentication to use a Proxy-management tool such as Proxifier ( http://www.proxifier.com/ for Mac OS X and Windows) to handle this.

For example with Proxifier you can set it up to only intercept java commands to be managed and redirected through its (authenticated) proxy. You're going to want to set the proxyHost and proxyPort values to blank in this case though, e.g. pass in -Dhttp.proxyHost= -Dhttp.proxyPort= to your java commands.

Answer 3

From the Java documentation (not the javadoc API):

http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/net/proxies.html

Set the JVM flags http.proxyHost and http.proxyPort when starting your JVM on the command line. This is usually done in a shell script (in Unix) or bat file (in Windows). Here's the example with the Unix shell script:

JAVA_FLAGS=-Dhttp.proxyHost=10.0.0.100 -Dhttp.proxyPort=8800
java ${JAVA_FLAGS} ...

When using containers such as JBoss or WebLogic, my solution is to edit the start-up scripts supplied by the vendor.

Many developers are familiar with the Java API (javadocs), but many times the rest of the documentation is overlooked. It contains a lot of interesting information: http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/

---

Update : If you do not want to use proxy to resolve some local/intranet hosts, check out the comment from @Tomalak:

Also don't forget the http.nonProxyHosts property!

-Dhttp.nonProxyHosts="localhost|127.0.0.1|10.*.*.*|*.foo.com‌​|etc"

Answer 4

Recently I've discovered the way to allow JVM to use browser proxy settings. What you need to do is to add ${java.home}/lib/deploy.jar to your project and to init the library like the following:

import com.sun.deploy.net.proxy.DeployProxySelector;
import com.sun.deploy.services.PlatformType;
import com.sun.deploy.services.ServiceManager;

import org.apache.commons.logging.Log;
import org.apache.commons.logging.LogFactory;

public abstract class ExtendedProxyManager {

    private static final Log logger = LogFactory.getLog(ExtendedProxyManager.class);

    /**
     * After calling this method, proxy settings can be magically retrieved from default browser settings.
     */
    public static boolean init() {
        logger.debug("Init started");

        // Initialization code was taken from com.sun.deploy.ClientContainer:
        ServiceManager
                .setService(System.getProperty("os.name").toLowerCase().indexOf("windows") != -1 ? PlatformType.STANDALONE_TIGER_WIN32
                        : PlatformType.STANDALONE_TIGER_UNIX);

        try {
            // This will call ProxySelector.setDefault():
            DeployProxySelector.reset();
        } catch (Throwable throwable) {
            logger.error("Unable to initialize extended dynamic browser proxy settings support.", throwable);

            return false;
        }

        return true;
    }
}

Afterwards the proxy settings are available to Java API via java.net.ProxySelector.

The only problem with this approach is that you need to start JVM with deploy.jar in bootclasspath e.g. java -Xbootclasspath/a:"%JAVA_HOME%\jre\lib\deploy.jar" -jar my.jar. If somebody knows how to overcome this limitation, let me know.

Answer 5

To use the system proxy setup:

java -Djava.net.useSystemProxies=true ...

Or programatically:

System.setProperty("java.net.useSystemProxies", "true");

Source: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/net/doc-files/net-properties.html

Answer 6

I am also behind firewall, this worked for me!!

System.setProperty("http.proxyHost", "proxy host addr");
System.setProperty("http.proxyPort", "808");
Authenticator.setDefault(new Authenticator() {
    protected PasswordAuthentication getPasswordAuthentication() {

        return new PasswordAuthentication("domain\\user","password".toCharArray());
    }
});

URL url = new URL("http://www.google.com/");
URLConnection con = url.openConnection();

BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(
                    con.getInputStream()));

// Read it ...
String inputLine;
while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null)
    System.out.println(inputLine);

in.close();