WSL: opensuse proxy settings

Alastair Grant | Friday 20 September 2019

I'm using openSUSE Leap on Windows 10 with WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), it provides a great way of accessing useful command line tools without having to install Linux - helpful where the client operating system has to be Windows.

I found one hitch and that's a proxy server being in my way when using the WSL shell. Fortunately configuring a proxy in openSUSE is very easy, you just need to create a file /etc/sysconfig/proxy with contents similar to:

PROXY_ENABLED="yes"
HTTP_PROXY="http://myproxy:3128"
HTTPS_PROXY="http://myproxy:3128"
FTP_PROXY="http://myproxy:3128"
NO_PROXY="localhost, 127.0.0.1, *.local, *.mydomain"

I though encountered a strange issue when implementing this. Every time I logged in with a Bash shell, my console would be spammed with the letter "y" for a long time before I'd get in. And when I did get in, the bash shell didn't have any of the configuration you'd normally expect.

Turns out I made the mistake of including spaces between the key and values in the proxy configuration file, e.g. HTTP_PROXY = "...". When I went back through and collapsed all the whitespace the issue went away.

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