Question

I’m trying to setup the HTTP client so that it uses a proxy, however I cannot quite understand how to do it. The documentation has multiple reference to “proxy” but none of the functions seem to allow to define the proxy. What I need is something like this:

client := &http.Client{}
client.SetProxy("someip:someport") // pseudo code
resp, err := client.Get("http://example.com") // do request through proxy

Any idea how to do this in Go?

Answer 1

lukad is correct, you could set the HTTP_PROXY environment variable, if you do this Go will use it by default.

Bash:

export HTTP_PROXY="http://proxyIp:proxyPort"

Go:

os.Setenv("HTTP_PROXY", "http://proxyIp:proxyPort")

You could also construct your own http.Client that MUST use a proxy regardless of the environment’s configuration:

proxyUrl, err := url.Parse("http://proxyIp:proxyPort")
myClient := &http.Client{Transport: &http.Transport{Proxy: http.ProxyURL(proxyUrl)}}

This is useful if you can not depend on the environment’s configuration, or do not want to modify it.

You could also modify the default transport used by the “net/http” package. This would affect your entire program (including the default HTTP client).

proxyUrl, err := url.Parse("http://proxyIp:proxyPort")
http.DefaultTransport = &http.Transport{Proxy: http.ProxyURL(proxyUrl)}