Force CPAN to download via HTTP

Question

I'm about to lose my mind. How in the world do you tell CPAN to download via HTTP only? ...and NOT via a proxy.

Answer 1

Simplest way of having it not use FTP is to shove HTTP URLs on the front of your urllist - or replace it completely like sebastionopilla said. You can do it from inside the cpan shell too:

o conf urllist unshift http://some.cpan.mirror/here/

You can use

o conf urllist -
o conf urllist shift

to empty it first if you wish.

Use

o conf no_proxy 1

to turn off the proxy.

Use

o conf commit

to save the config

Answer 2

Try putting only HTTP URLs in your CPAN's Config.pm file, like:

'urllist' => [q[http://cpan.cict.fr/], q[http://cpan.enstimac.fr/], q[http://mirrors4.kernel.org/cpan/]],

I routinely do this and as far as I can see there's no FTP traffic to any CPAN mirror.

Answer 3

If you don't want to use a cpan shell, you can also edit your cpan config file with a text editor, in unix systems it's here:

~/.cpan/CPAN/MyConfig.pm

Of course, the field to change in your particular question is 'http_proxy'.

Answer 4

cpan[1]> o conf /proxy/
cpan[2]> o conf no_proxy 1
cpan[3]> o conf commit

Answer 5

Try these:

1. Before running cpan: export -n http_proxy
2. In the cpan shell: o conf http_proxy ''
3. To save your modified cpan config: o conf commit

That will disable any http proxy CPAN is configured to use.