Proxy with urllib2

Question

I open urls with:

site = urllib2.urlopen(\'http://google.com\')

And what I want to do is connect the same way with a proxy I got somewhere telli

Answer 1

You can set proxies using environment variables.

import os
os.environ['http_proxy'] = '127.0.0.1'
os.environ['https_proxy'] = '127.0.0.1'

urllib2 will add proxy handlers automatically this way. You need to set proxies for different protocols separately otherwise they will fail (in terms of not going through proxy), see below.

For example:

proxy = urllib2.ProxyHandler({'http': '127.0.0.1'})
opener = urllib2.build_opener(proxy)
urllib2.install_opener(opener)
urllib2.urlopen('http://www.google.com')
# next line will fail (will not go through the proxy) (https)
urllib2.urlopen('https://www.google.com')

Instead

proxy = urllib2.ProxyHandler({
    'http': '127.0.0.1',
    'https': '127.0.0.1'
})
opener = urllib2.build_opener(proxy)
urllib2.install_opener(opener)
# this way both http and https requests go through the proxy
urllib2.urlopen('http://www.google.com')
urllib2.urlopen('https://www.google.com')