Jacob Stanley « Blog
Written by Jacob Stanley on October 27, 2010
This post applies to Ubuntu Server 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)
I had some trouble installing gems (as root) behind our corporate proxy server today.
$ sudo gem install rake
ERROR: http://rubygems.org/ does not appear to be a repository
ERROR: Could not find a valid gem 'rake' (>= 0) in any repository
This is despite the fact that my http_proxy environment variable had been set in my ~/.bashrc file.
# ~/.bashrc: executed by bash(1) for non-login shells.
# HTTP Proxy
export http_proxy=http://username:password@192.168.0.1:80/
# ...It turns out that you need to do some tweaking if you want sudo to carry your proxy environment across from the current user. To do this, run sudo visudo and add the env_keep line below:
# /etc/sudoers
#
# This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root.
#
# See the man page for details on how to write a sudoers file.
#
Defaults env_reset
Defaults env_keep += "http_proxy https_proxy ftp_proxy"Once you’re done editing, press Ctrl+X to exit, then Y to save your changes and make sure you save them to /etc/sudoers and not /etc/sudoers.tmp like it suggests. Press Y when it asks if you want to overwrite.
Now everything should be sweet. You can check that the environment is propagating using env.
$ sudo env | grep http_proxy
http_proxy=http://username:password@192.168.0.1:80/
And finally…
$ sudo gem install rake
Successfully installed rake-0.8.7
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for rake-0.8.7...
Installing RDoc documentation for rake-0.8.7...