Question

I have the 4.0.1 Dakar release up and running. All looks good. The question concerns running a Plugin Installer Perl script (shipped with the Plugin tar file), when the server is located behind a firewall which requires an http proxy to be specified.

Specifically, I'm trying to install the BlogPlugin, and was trying to run the BlogPlugin_installer.pl script, after untar-ing the .tgz contents to the locations specified. (The BlogPlugin now shows up under the Plugins section when I run configure).

Prior to running the script,I did the following to specify my http proxy host ..

 set http_proxy="http://myproxy.mydomain.com:80"
 export http_proxy

After hitting return on the prompt to proceed with the installation I get ..

##########################################################
Checking dependency on TWiki::Plugins....
##########################################################
Checking dependency on TWiki::Plugins::AliasPlugin....
*** BlogPlugin depends on perl package TWiki::Plugins::AliasPlugin >=1.2
which is described as "Required"
But when I tried to find it I got this error:

Can't locate TWiki/Plugins/AliasPlugin.pm

Would you like me to try to download and install the latest version of AliasPlugin from twiki.org? [y/n] y
Failed to download AliasPlugin
500 Can't connect to twiki.org:80 (connect: No route to host)
##########################################################
Checking dependency on TWiki::Plugins::DBCachePlugin....
*** BlogPlugin depends on perl package TWiki::Plugins::DBCachePlugin >=0.97
which is described as "Required"
But when I tried to find it I got this error:

Can't locate TWiki/Plugins/DBCachePlugin.pm

Would you like me to try to download and install the latest version of DBCachePlugin from twiki.org? [y/n]

At this point, I abort. I've tried poking around with the above and rerunning for quite sometime now, without any luck.
Note, from a browser -- I can connect to https://twiki.org:80 just fine.

I think I'm missing something very basic here, but I'm stumped as to what?

Environment

-- KalDe - 21 Mar 2006

Answer

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the _install.pl scripts simply install any dependencies for you that a plugin might need. if you're having problems running these scripts from behind a firewall, download the prerequisites manually from twiki.org and install them as you're doing for BlogPlugin

-- WillNorris - 11 Apr 2006

The _install.pl scripts are helpful, particularly for big plugins like BlogPlugin which have many dependencies. Unfortunately these scripts aren't written with users behind firewalls in mind. Future versions should include an option to specify the http/ftp proxies, or perhaps read them automatically from the HTTP_PROXY and FTP_PROXY environment variables. Meanwhile, you can add proxy information manually into the scripts with the following steps (specific to BlogPlugin, but can be applied similarly to all other plugin _install.pl scripts as well):

1. Edit BlogPlugin_installer.pl, and look for the line $lwp = new LWP::UserAgent();. Add the line $lwp->proxy(['http', 'ftp'], 'http://my.www.proxy.com/'); after it. Save the file.
2. Run BlogPlugin_installer.pl. Ignore errors regarding DBCacheContrib and ExtendedSelectPlugin as we'll fix them later.
3. Now add your proxy information as described in step 1, but this time on DBCachePlugin_installer.pl.
4. Run the DBCachePlugin_installer.pl= script.
5. If you still have problems with DBCachePlugin installation (i.e. it hangs), run DBCacheContrib_installer.pl manually first.

Hope that this works for you.

-- JamesTan - 15 Jun 2006

Or add the following line after "$lwp->agent("TWikiPluginsInstaller");": $lwp->env_proxy();

-- PeterStephens - 06 Aug 2007