Using Subclipse Behind a Proxy Server

At my day job I sit behind a corporate firewall protecting and caching web traffic (among other things). For the most part it stays out of the way. But sometimes it rears its ugly head and stands firmly in the path of what I am trying to do.

Earlier this week I was trying to look at a cool new general validation system for ColdFusion called Validat, put out by the great guys at Alagad. They don't have a download on the RIAForge site yet, but the files are available via SVN. I loaded up the subclipse plugin into my Eclipse, restarted and began adding the Validat SVN repository. I started getting errors abou the "RA layer request failed" and "svn: PROPFIND request failed on /Validat/trunk", followed by an error about not being able to connect to the SVN server.

I already had Eclipse setup with my proxy settings, so I thought I was doing something wrong or Alagad didn't actually have the subversion repository up-and-available. After going home that night, I tried it from home and wa-la it worked. Stupid proxy server! So the subclipse plugin won't use the Eclipse proxy settings. (Can that be fixed please!). After digging around the subclipse help site and being redirected to the collab.net help, then unproductively searching through the eclipse workspace, plugins, and configuration folders for the settings file, I was finally able to figure out how to set up subclipse to use the proxy server.

In my Windows development environment, I opened the following file: "C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Subversion\servers" in text editor. Near the bottom of that file is a [global] section with http-proxy-host and http-proxy-port settings. I uncommented those two lines, modified them for my corporate proxy server, went back to the SVN Repository view in Eclipse, refreshed the Validat repository and Boom! it worked!