Who is not puzzled by all the applications that require proxy configuration. There are simply to many places you have to configure:

  • Gnome desktop
  • Liferea
  • Evolution
  • Kopete
  • VideoLAN Client
  • [and many many more].

Even worse, not all of them support the same feature set or some require different options entered. In our company for example we use a Proxy Autoconfiguration Script. Mainly a java script, but this imposes a lot of problems for many applications. They simply refuse to parse Javascript (for lack of capabilities).

Wouldn’t it just be great if ALL this would be handled in a transparent way? The users will love all developers for it. And for the developers? Libproxy is probably the simplest answer to your problem! A small footprint, a stunning easy API and all you need to do to know what proxy to use is pass the URL you want to connect to through to libproxy. Libproxy though does NOT perform the communication to the proxy. There are many libs dealing with this already.

Libproxy reads the needed proxy settings from

  • GNOME configuration
  • KDE Configuration
  • system wide proxy.conf file
  • Environment variables (http_proxy and alike)

If needed it can even fall back to ‘Automatic proxy detection’ using the wpad protocol.

All this is offered to you, dearest developers, under the LPGL 2.1 or later!

The more applications make use of libproxy, the better the experience for the enduser and the less points where a proxy needs to be configured.

Some Applications already DO use libproxy, a list (incomplete) can be seen at: Libproxy adoption list