DCU Proxy And Scripts

Have you ever tried to run a script on Redbrick that communicates with external websites and found that it doesn't work?

This might be due to the proxy being set wrong. For example on [Installing Wordpress on Redbrick|Installing Wordpress]] the proxy must be set manually in one of the files.

The proxy on Redbrick is 'http://proxy.dcu.ie:8080'. This is normally set via enviromental variables that your script can pick up. This variables are case-sensitive.

HTTP_PROXY=proxy.dcu.ie:8080
FTP_PROXY=proxy.dcu.ie:8080
http_proxy=http://proxy.dcu.ie:8080
ftp_proxy=http://proxy.dcu.ie:8080

These variables break Python's 'urllib' module because it wants the 'HTTP_PROXY' setting but finds the 'http_proxy'. You can quickly fix this in your script by having:

os.environ['HTTP_PROXY'] = "http://proxy.dcu.ie:8080"

or

HTTP_PROXY = "http://proxy.dcu.ie:8080"

(or both) near the top of the Python script (at least after 'import os').