Force CPAN to download via HTTP (skipping proxy)

Question

I'm about to lose my mind. How in the world do you tell CPAN to download via HTTP only? ...and NOT via a proxy.

Answer 1

Simplest way of having it not use FTP is to shove HTTP URLs on the front of your urllist - or replace it completely like sebastionopilla said. You can do it from inside the cpan shell too:

o conf urllist unshift http://some.cpan.mirror/here/

You can use

o conf urllist -
o conf urllist shift

to empty it first if you wish.

Use

o conf no_proxy 1

to turn off the proxy.

Use

o conf commit

to save the config

Answer 2

Try these:

1. Before running cpan: export -n http_proxy
2. In the cpan shell: o conf http_proxy ''
3. To save your modified cpan config: o conf commit

That will disable any http proxy CPAN is configured to use.

Answer 3

Try putting only HTTP URLs in your CPAN's Config.pm file, like:

'urllist' => [q[http://cpan.cict.fr/], q[http://cpan.enstimac.fr/], q[http://mirrors4.kernel.org/cpan/]],

I routinely do this and as far as I can see there's no FTP traffic to any CPAN mirror.

Answer 4

cpan[1]> o conf /proxy/
cpan[2]> o conf no_proxy 1
cpan[3]> o conf commit

Set proxy username and password:

cpan[4]> o conf proxy_user your_username
cpan[5]> o conf proxy_pass your_password
cpan[6]> o conf commit

Answer 5

If you don't want to use a cpan shell, you can also edit your cpan config file with a text editor, in unix systems it's here:

~/.cpan/CPAN/MyConfig.pm

Of course, the field to change in your particular question is 'http_proxy'.