zulip/templates/zerver/help/connect-through-a-proxy.md

Connect through a proxy

Some corporate and university networks may require you to connect to Zulip via a proxy.

Web

Zulip uses your browser's default proxy settings. To set a custom proxy just for Zulip, check your browser's instructions for setting a custom proxy for a single website.

Desktop

1. Click on the gear () icon in the lower left corner.

2. Select the Network tab.

System proxy settings

3. Click Use system proxy settings.

4. Restart the Zulip desktop app.

Custom proxy settings

3. Click Manual proxy configuration.

4. Either enter a URL for PAC script, or fill out Proxy rules and Proxy bypass rules.

5. Click Save changes.

In most corporate environments, your network administrator will provide a URL for the PAC script.

The second most common configuration is that your network administrator has set up a proxy server for accessing the public internet, but URLs on the local network must be accessed directly. In that case set Proxy rules to the URL of the proxy server (it may look something like http://proxy.example.edu:port), and Proxy bypass rules to cover local URLs (it may look something like *.example.edu,10.0.0.0/8).

If either of those apply, you can skip the rest of this guide. If not, we document the syntax for Proxy rules and Proxy bypass rules below.

Proxy rules

A semicolon-separated list of protocolRules.

protocolRule -> [<protocol>"="]<URLList>
protocol -> "http" | "https" | "ftp" | "socks"
URLList -> comma-separated list of URLs, ["direct://"]

Some examples:

• http=http://foo:80;ftp=http://bar:1080 - Use proxy http://foo:80 for http:// URLs, and proxy http://bar:1080 for ftp:// URLs.
• http://foo:80 - Use proxy http://foo:80 for all URLs.
• http://foo:80,socks5://bar,direct:// - Use proxy http://foo:80 for all URLs, failing over to socks5://bar if http://foo:80 is unavailable, and after that using no proxy.
• http=http://foo;socks5://bar - Use proxy http://foo for http:// URLs, and use socks5://bar for all other URLs.

Proxy bypass rules

A comma-separated list of URIs. The URIs can be hostnames, IP address literals, or IP ranges in CIDR notation. Hostnames can use the * wildcard. Use <local> to match any of 127.0.0.1, ::1, or localhost.