Forcing all outgoing connections through proxies

Question

How can I do this in Linux? It'd be nice if there was a way to transparently force connections through proxies rather than configure them individually for each program.

Solution

You want proxychains. From the Ubuntu package manager description:

Proxy chains force any tcp connection made by any given tcp client to follow through proxy (or proxy chain). It is a kind of proxifier. It acts like sockscap / premeo / eborder driver ( intercepts TCP calls )

This version supports SOCKS4, SOCKS5 and HTTP CONNECT proxy servers. Different proxy types can be mixed in the same chain.

Features:

• Access Internet from behind restrictive firewall.
• Source IP masquerade.
• SSH tunneling and forwarding.
• Dynamic LAN-to-LAN VPN channel.
• Servers and daemons friendly (works fine with sendmail MTA).

Comments

[ScoBe]

note that simply setting the http_proxy environment variable will tell many http-using programs that you want them to use this proxy. It just won't force them if they don't refer to the variable or have their own settings. It's a simple setting which works for many cases.

[oscarftoro]

Hey, looks exactly like what I need. Thanks a lot!

[Liam Dawson]

@ScoBe sadly, many is nowhere near enough. Using the Heroku toolbelt, for example, and wget seems to choke on my proxy settings (because I have username/password, and it thinks the username is a hostname). But thank you for this answer, it's exactly what I needed.