How do I route watir through a proxy pragmatically?

Question

I'm trying to route watir through a proxy pragmatically -- this means within the script I'd like to change my proxy dynamically before launching the browser.

Here's what I've tried so far (and so far am failing): I'm running chrome and lucid lynx ubuntu. I chose TREX cause I thought watir might be making use of PROXY or something.

I rewrote /usr/bin/google-chrome as:

#!/bin/bash
/opt/google/chrome/chrome --proxy-server="$TREX" $@

The reason I'm passing in the environment variable to proxy-server rather than http_proxy is because I never could get http_proxy to work as is anyways

then I did a simple:

require 'rubygems'
require 'watir-webdriver'

ENV['TREX'] = "XX.XX.XX.XX:YY"
browser = Watir::Browser.new(:chrome)
browser.goto("http://mysite.com")

Anyways, what is happening here is that it is forwarding me to the login page of the proxy rather than just forwarding the request.

What am I missing here? I feel like I'm pretty close.

Answer 1

require 'win32/registry'

PROXY_SERVER_IP = "192.168.1.20" PROXY_SERVER_PORT = "3128"

def set_browser_to_use_proxy

log "Enabling Proxy at #{PROXY_SERVER_IP}:#{PROXY_SERVER_PORT}" Win32::Registry::HKEY_CURRENT_USER.open('SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings' , Win32::Registry::KEY_WRITE) do |reg| reg.write('ProxyEnable', Win32::Registry::REG_BINARY, '1') reg.write('ProxyServer' , Win32::Registry::REG_SZ, "#{PROXY_SERVER_IP}:#{PROXY_SERVER_PORT}" )
reg.write('ProxyOverride' , Win32::Registry::REG_SZ, '') end end

def set_browser_to_use_proxy_off

log "Disabling Proxy at #{PROXY_SERVER_IP}:#{PROXY_SERVER_PORT}" Win32::Registry::HKEY_CURRENT_USER.open('SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings' , Win32::Registry::KEY_WRITE) do |reg| reg.write('ProxyEnable', Win32::Registry::REG_DWORD, '0') reg.write('ProxyServer' , Win32::Registry::REG_SZ, "#{PROXY_SERVER_IP}:#{PROXY_SERVER_PORT}" )
reg.write('ProxyOverride' , Win32::Registry::REG_SZ, '') end end

Answer 2

The problem here is that you cannot auto authenticate to a proxy server using chrome --proxy-server=blah:3128

Chrome will always prompt you for a user name and password on an authenticating proxy when it starts up (via webdriver or manually)

A complicated way around this is to install a local instance of apache with squid as a transparent proxy that authenticates to the remote proxy server. Then you just start chrome with the proxy flag pointed to the local squid proxy. In other words, chain an unauthenticated proxy in front of the authenticated proxy...

I've also been searching for a solution to this problem. I thought maybe something like webrick as a proxy, or corksrew... but can't get the answer just yet ...