Thursday, October 25, 2012

Committer Access to Eclipse.org Git Repositories behind a Proxy

There are lots of Eclipse committers that are employed by corporations and spend their day in an office protected with strong security measures. In other words they work behind a corporate proxy and have not direct access to Internet, which makes it hard using some network protocols on their usual ports, like SSH on port 22.

These committers have three alternatives for committer access to git.eclipse.org:
  1. Find a pubic WiFi or 3G network and temporarily switch to it. This is not always possible: requires WiFi / 3G adapter and available network, and not really convenient: requires to switch network adapters and proxy settings. 
  2. Request the Eclipse webmasters to provide HTTPS access to the respective Git repository. HTTPS works very well behind corporate proxies. Unfortunately it is not enabled by default for Eclipse.org Git repositories and the webmasters have their security concerns for doing this. 
  3. Try the good old proxy.eclipse.org as we know it from the CVS Howto guide. If it worked for you for accessing the CVS repositories then it should work also for the Git repositories. This is a nice workaround - it tunnels the SSH protocol from proxy.eclipse.org:443 to git.eclipse.org:22. If the configuration of your corporate proxy is not absolutely paranoic then you should be able to take advantage of this option. Here is an example screenshot of EGit configured to clone the Eclipse Libra website repository:

Happy gitting!