This tuturial will explain how to use git through a proxy, for example if you are behind a firewall or on a private network.

The examples are valid for connections inside the .cms network at Point 5, but it should be simple to adapt them to other configurations.

What kind of proxy

The most common are an HTTP proxy, and a SOCKS5 proxy - for example, one opened with the ssh -D command, documented in ssh(1).

How to open a SOCKS proxy through an SSH tunnel

The ssh command distributed with most Unix-like systems can open a SOCKS proxy on the local machine and forward all connections through the ssh tunnel.

For example

ssh -f -N -D 1080 cmsusr.cms

will connect to the host cmsusr.cms, open a SOCKS proxy on the local host on port 1080 (-D 1080), and put the process in background after a successful connection (-f -N).

How to connect to a git repository using the SSH protocol

If the remote has a format like

git@github.com:cms-sw/cmssw.git
ssh://git@github.com/cms-sw/cmssw.git

then you are connecting to the git server using the SSH protocol.

In this case, git relis on ssh to handle the connection; in order to connect through a SOCKS proxy you have to configure ssh itself, setting the ProxyCommand option in your ~/.ssh/config file:

Host github.com
    User                    git
    ProxyCommand            nc -x localhost:1080 %h %p

OR On CentOS7 you can

Host github.com
    User                    git
    ProxyCommand            ssh cmsusr nc %h %p

For more information, see ssh_config(5).

How to connect to a git repository using the HTTP or HTTPS protocols

If the remote has a format like

http://github.com/cms-sw/cmssw.git
https://github.com/cms-sw/cmssw.git

then you are connecting to the git server using the HTTP or HTTPS protocols. In the old days, this used to be a dumb protocol, but since git 1.6.6 it uses a smart protocol similar to that used by SSH or GIT.

In this case git uses libcurl to handle the connection; the version of git bundled with CMSSW supports different kinds of proxies: SOCKS4, SOCKS4a, SOCKS5, and HTTP/HTTPS. In order to connect through any proxy supported by libcurl, you can set the http.proxy option:

git config --global http.proxy socks5://localhost:1080

For more information, see the --proxy option in curl(1) and the http.proxy entry in git-config(1).

How to connect to a git repository using the GIT protocol

If the remote has a format like

git://github.com/cms-sw/cmssw.git

then you are connecting to the git server using the GIT protocol.

In this case, it is possible to use a helper command to connect through any kind of proxy. A simple script is included with CMSSW, to connect through a SOCKS5 proxy: git-proxy. You can configure git to use it with

git config --global core.gitproxy "git-proxy"
git config --global socks.proxy "localhost:1080"

For more information, see git-proxy --help.

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