Setting proxy to urllib.request (Python3)

I needed to disable the proxy in our company environment, because I wanted to access a server on localhost. I could not disable the proxy server with the approach from @mhawke (tried to pass {}, None and [] as proxies).

This worked for me (can also be used for setting a specific proxy, see comment in code).

import urllib.request as request

# disable proxy by passing an empty
proxy_handler = request.ProxyHandler({})
# alertnatively you could set a proxy for http with
# proxy_handler = request.ProxyHandler({'http': 'http://www.example.com:3128/'})

opener = request.build_opener(proxy_handler)

url = 'http://www.example.org'

# open the website with the opener
req = opener.open(url)
data = req.read().decode('utf8')
print(data)

Urllib will automatically detect proxies set up in the environment - so one can just set the HTTP_PROXY variable either in your environment e.g. for Bash:

export HTTP_PROXY=http://proxy_url:proxy_port

or using Python e.g.

import os
os.environ['HTTP_PROXY'] = 'http://proxy_url:proxy_port'

Note from the urllib docs: "HTTP_PROXY[environment variable] will be ignored if a variable REQUEST_METHOD is set; see the documentation on getproxies()"

You should be calling set_proxy() on an instance of class Request, not on the class itself:

from urllib import request as urlrequest

proxy_host = 'localhost:1234'    # host and port of your proxy
url = 'http://www.httpbin.org/ip'

req = urlrequest.Request(url)
req.set_proxy(proxy_host, 'http')

response = urlrequest.urlopen(req)
print(response.read().decode('utf8'))