Setting JVM/JRE to use Windows Proxy Automatically

Question

I did see the question about setting the proxy for the JVM but what I want to ask is how one can utilize the proxy that is already configured (on Windows).

Here is a

Answer 1

I found an odd behavior experimenting with the suggested code here.

It appears that, after a default ProxySelector has been set, regular socket code (e.g. creating a new Socket) does not work anymore, because it tries to use a socks server (not sure why it would do this, but for me it does).

So if you, when calling

Socket socket = new Socket(host, port);

you receive such a SocketException:

java.net.SocketException: Malformed reply from SOCKS server
    at java.net.SocksSocketImpl.readSocksReply(Unknown Source)
    at java.net.SocksSocketImpl.connect(Unknown Source)
    at java.net.Socket.connect(Unknown Source)
    at java.net.Socket.connect(Unknown Source)
    at java.net.Socket.(Unknown Source)
    at java.net.Socket.(Unknown Source)

then try setting the default ProxySelector back to null:

ProxySelector.setDefault(null);

For me this resulted in the following small Java class which I now use to simply retrieve the systems proxy settings without having it affect the further usage of Sockets() of the application, yet configuring the system properly to use the proxy:

public class ProxyConfig {

  private static String host;
  private static int port;

  public static void init() {
    System.setProperty("java.net.useSystemProxies", "true");
    Proxy proxy = getProxy();
    if (proxy != null) {
      InetSocketAddress addr = (InetSocketAddress) proxy.address();
      host = addr.getHostName();
      port = addr.getPort();

      System.setProperty("java.net.useSystemProxies", "false");
      System.setProperty("http.proxyHost", host);
      System.setProperty("http.proxyPort", ""+port);

    }
    System.setProperty("java.net.useSystemProxies", "false");
  }

  public static String getHost() {
    return host;
  }

  public static int getPort() {
    return port;
  }

  private static Proxy getProxy() {
    List l = null;
    try {
      ProxySelector def = ProxySelector.getDefault();

      l = def.select(new URI("http://foo/bar"));
      ProxySelector.setDefault(null);
    } catch (Exception e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
    }
    if (l != null) {
      for (Iterator iter = l.iterator(); iter.hasNext();) {
        java.net.Proxy proxy = iter.next();
        return proxy;
      }
    }
    return null;
  }
}