Proxies in Python FTP application

Question

I\'m developing an FTP client in Python ftplib. How do I add proxies support to it (most FTP apps I have seen seem to have it)? I\'m especially thinking about SOCKS proxies,

Answer 1

Here is workaround using requests, tested with a squid proxy that does NOT support CONNECT tunneling:

def ftp_fetch_file_through_http_proxy(host, user, password, remote_filepath, http_proxy, output_filepath):
    """
    This function let us to make a FTP RETR query through a HTTP proxy that does NOT support CONNECT tunneling.
    It is equivalent to: curl -x $HTTP_PROXY --user $USER:$PASSWORD ftp://$FTP_HOST/path/to/file
    It returns the 'Last-Modified' HTTP header value from the response.

    More precisely, this function sends the following HTTP request to $HTTP_PROXY:
        GET ftp://$USER:$PASSWORD@$FTP_HOST/path/to/file HTTP/1.1
    Note that in doing so, the host in the request line does NOT match the host we send this packet to.

    Python `requests` lib does not let us easily "cheat" like this.
    In order to achieve what we want, we need:
    - to mock urllib3.poolmanager.parse_url so that it returns a (host,port) pair indicating to send the request to the proxy
    - to register a connection adapter to the 'ftp://' prefix. This is basically a HTTP adapter but it uses the FULL url of
    the resource to build the request line, instead of only its relative path.
    """
    url = 'ftp://{}:{}@{}/{}'.format(user, password, host, remote_filepath)
    proxy_host, proxy_port = http_proxy.split(':')

    def parse_url_mock(url):
        return requests.packages.urllib3.util.url.parse_url(url)._replace(host=proxy_host, port=proxy_port, scheme='http')

    with open(output_filepath, 'w+b') as output_file, patch('requests.packages.urllib3.poolmanager.parse_url', new=parse_url_mock):
        session = requests.session()
        session.mount('ftp://', FTPWrappedInFTPAdapter())
        response = session.get(url)
        response.raise_for_status()
        output_file.write(response.content)
        return response.headers['last-modified']


class FTPWrappedInFTPAdapter(requests.adapters.HTTPAdapter):
    def request_url(self, request, _):
        return request.url