Using a Proxy with yum on CentOS/RHEL

If you follow this blog, you'll know that I wrote on how to add http proxy support to apt-get. What about CentOS? Gotta show love to the 'yum' runners out there. So here we go.

Of course, you can always run:

$ export http_proxy="http://username:password@proxy:port/";
$ export https_proxy="http://username:password@proxy:port/";

I've had some iffy results at times though, and it definitely doesn't work for cron processes or other users. It's not like the system is moving anytime soon, so let's just set this permanently in the yum configs.

$ sudo vi /etc/yum.conf

It will prompt you for your sudo password (if you're not already root). After that, you'll be editing the yum.conf file. There are numerous lines in here that are important, and you may want to look into tweaking settings, but that's not what this post is about. For the Proxy, you simply have to tack in the following line.

proxy="http://username:password@proxy.example.com:port/"

Doesn't matter where it is in the file, but you'll want to search the file real quick to make sure you're not duplicating the 'proxy' settings or you may not get the outcome you expect.

Save it, and make sure to run an 'yum update' to get the latest package lists and such. You should notice that it rolls right through them now that your system is able to talk out to the internet. Huzzah.