DISCONTINUED...

Please look here https://github.com/fedux-org/proxy_pac_rb for some other solutions to distribute a proxy.pac.

LocalPac - the proxy.pac-distribution engine

local_pac serves two main purposes:

1. Serve proxy.pac-files (compressed from a git repository).
2. Lookup of url in proxy.pac to find out which proxy will be used.

Behind the scenes it uses ...

• a javascript compressor (uglifier)
• a proxy-pac parser (proxy_pac_rb)
• a vcs library (rugged)
• etc.

Possible use cases:

• Administrator serving proxy.pacs to thousands of clients
• Internal developer using virtual machines on her laptop to develop web applications but who still needs access to external web applications via internal proxy
• Developer/Consultant using a vpn connection to her customer + internal proxy/socks proxy, but still needs direct access to the internet web applications
• Supporter who needs to support thousand of clients and needs to check which internal proxies is used for a given url
• Curious people loving git and using it for every possible use case ;-)

Screenshots

Search for a url

Pretty result for a url

Raw result for a url

Performance

To give you a hint about the performance which can be expected from local_pac with production environment settings, please see the results of a test done with ab - the apache benchmark - on my laptop in a virtual machine with two cores at 2.90GHz and with 4GB RAM - CPU = Core i7-3520M.

local_pac serve --environment production

ab -c 10 -n 10000 http://127.0.0.1:8000/v1/pac/proxy.pac

Server Software:
Server Hostname:        127.0.0.1
Server Port:            8000

Document Path:          /v1/pac/proxy.pac
Document Length:        708 bytes

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   27.341 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      8940000 bytes
HTML transferred:       7080000 bytes
Requests per second:    365.75 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       27.341 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       2.734 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          319.31 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.2      0       5
Processing:     2   27   9.9     25     118
Waiting:        2   26   9.5     24      89
Total:          2   27   9.9     25     119

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%     25
  66%     27
  75%     29
  80%     31
  90%     36
  95%     50
  98%     62
  99%     67
 100%    119 (longest request)

Installation

RubyGems

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'local_pac'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install local_pac

Arch Linux

# Install via yaourt
yaourt -S local_pac

# Install via cower + makepkg
cower -d local_pac
cd <dir>
makepkg -is

Usage

Quickstart

Initialize local_pac

% local_pac init --pre-seed

Starting Webserver

% local_pac serve

Download proxy.pac on commandline

% curl --noproxy "*" http://localhost:8000/v1/pac/proxy.pac

Starting webbrowser and open web application

% firefox http://localhost:8000/v1/lookup/proxy.pac

Getting started (Work in Progress)

Make sure that you place a config file for local_pac in one of the following places or let local_pac generate a file on default values (see below).

• $HOME/.config/local_pac/config.yaml
• $HOME/.local_pac/config.yaml
• /etc/local_pac/config.yaml

A config file could look like the following one:

:local_storage: /var/local_pac/data/storage.git
:pid_file: /run/local_pac/pid
:access_log: /var/log/local_pac/access.log
:sass_cache: /var/local_pac/cache

After creating creating that file, you can check it by running local_pac status --config-file <file>. If your file could be parsed successfully, you can initialize the local_pac-environment by running local_pac initialize --config-file <file> or local_pac initialize. The latter works only if you placed your config file at one of the known paths mentioned above.

The next step is to clone the newly created repository - e.g. at /home/<user>/.local/share/data/storage.git.

Summary:

1. Create a config file
2. Check config file
3. Initialize local_pac
4. Clone local_pac-git-repository
5. Add a proxy.pac to git-repository
6. Push to local_pac-git-repository
7. Restart local_pac-service

Serving proxy.pacs

You need to place your proxy.pac in one of the following directories:

• $HOME/.config/pacfiles/
• $HOME/.pacfiles/

Otherwise the gem will use it's default proxy.pac:

function FindProxyForURL(url, host) {
  return "DIRECT";
}

After storing your proxy.pac-files you can serve them via:

local_pac serve

# Output:
# [2014-02-11 14:30:51] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1
# [2014-02-11 14:30:51] INFO  ruby 1.9.3 (2013-11-22) [x86_64-linux]
# == Sinatra/1.4.4 has taken the stage on 8000 for development with backup from WEBrick
# [2014-02-11 14:30:51] INFO  WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=2295 port=8000

After that you need to point your browser to your proxy.pac:

http://localhost:8000/v1/pac/<name>.pac

If you want to use it in a larger deployment, you might want to use the systemd-files provided by the gem:

• share/system/local_pac.socket
• share/system/local_pac.service

There are some options supported by serve. Please use local_pac help serve to get a full and up-to-date overview.

$ local_pac help serve
Usage:
  local_pac serve

Options:
  [--access-log=ACCESS_LOG]    # File to write access log to
  [--port=N]                   # The port the server listens on
                               # Default: 8000
  [--config-file=CONFIG_FILE]  # Config file
  [--log-level=LOG_LEVEL]      # Log level for ui logging

Initialize environment

To initialize your environment, you can use local_pac init. To overwrite existing files add the --force-flag: local_pac init --force.

$ local_pac init
W, [2014-02-14T12:52:41.980670 #5343]  WARN -- : Repository "/home/user/.local/share/local_pac/run" already exists. Do not create it again!.
W, [2014-02-14T12:52:41.983601 #5343]  WARN -- : Repository "/home/user/.local/share/local_pac/log" already exists. Do not create it again!.
W, [2014-02-14T12:52:41.986188 #5343]  WARN -- : Repository "/home/user/.local/share/local_pac/data" already exists. Do not create it again!.
W, [2014-02-14T12:52:41.988631 #5343]  WARN -- : File "/home/user/.local/share/local_pac/data/hooks/pre-receive" already exists. Do not create it again!.

Config variables

To make debugging a little bit easier you can view the config values used by local_pac by running local_pac config.

option | value
-------------------- + --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
          access_log | /home/user/.local/share/local_pac/log/access.log
       local_storage | /home/user/.local/share/local_pac/data
            pid_file | /home/user/.local/share/local_pac/run/pid
            gem_path | /home/user/.gem/ruby/1.9.3, /opt/rubies/1.9.3/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1

Reading

A good website to support you writing proxy.pac-files is: http://findproxyforurl.com.

Documentation

http://www.rubydoc.info/github/dg-vrnetze/local_pac/frames

Future

• Improve API to support further functionality

Development

Please read the developer documentation README.DEVELOPER.md.

Copyright

2014, Dennis Günnewig (VR Netze GmbH, http://www.vrnetze.de)

Contributing

1. Fork it ( http://github.com//local_pac/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request