proxy-toggle.sh

September 13, 2012

Reason for Being

I need to change my proxy settings regularly depending on which network I’m connected to. I initially tried Proxy Switchy but found that it took up too much CPU time. There is no excuse for that in such a simple utility, so I decided to trash it and do things the old fashioned way.

##Method

It turns out that it’s quite trivial to change proxy settings on OS X:

sudo networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxy <network service> <proxy_host> <port_number>

example:

sudo networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxy "Wi-Fi" localhost 1080

Then you turn if off with:

sudo networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxystate off

Script

However, I can’t be trusted to remember the full commands and arguments so I wrote a tiny script to do it:

#!/bin/sh

PROXY_INTERFACE="USB Ethernet"
PROXY_HOST=localhost
PROXY_PORT=1080

if [[ $1 == "on" ]]; then
    sudo networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxy "$PROXY_INTERFACE" $PROXY_HOST $PROXY_PORT
    echo "SOCKS proxy enabled"

elif [[ $1 == "off" ]]; then
    sudo networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxystate "$PROXY_INTERFACE" off
    echo "SOCKS proxy disabled"

elif [[ $1 == "status" ]]; then
    echo "======================================================"
    echo "Network Services:"
    echo "======================================================"
    networksetup -listallnetworkservices
    echo
    echo "======================================================"
    echo "Current SOCKS Proxy Settings:"
    echo "======================================================"
    networksetup -getsocksfirewallproxy "$PROXY_INTERFACE"
    echo

else
    echo "`basename $0` toggles SOCKS proxy settings on OS X"
    echo
    echo "Usage: "
    echo "  $ proxy on           # turns SOCKS proxy on"
    echo "  $ proxy off          # turns SOCKS proxy off"
    echo "  $ proxy status       # prints status of proxy settings"
    echo
    echo "proxy interface:      " $PROXY_INTERFACE
    echo "proxy host:           " $PROXY_HOST
    echo "proxy port:           " $PROXY_PORT
    echo
    exit 65 # end process with error to indicate incorrect arguments
fi

Cheers.