[SOLVED] Dynamic proxy configuration for browsers

Hello LQ,

I'd like to have a command line like

net.proxy.setup

that would do the necessary steps to ensure my browser
(currently firefox)
uses a specific proxy,
and

net.proxy.stop

that would configure it to stop using the proxy.

Anyway i could do that?

I thought maybe if I configured the browser to use the system-defined proxy,
then I could change the system-defined proxy from the command line,
but I don't know anything about system-defined proxies.

btw I tried to set HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY environement variables
but it didn't work.
According to this answer on SO,
firefox doesn't read them.

On a side note the proposed solution was to sed the js configuration files,
I didn't try that.
I'm curious about setting up a system-defined proxy solution,
and does firefox picks that up dynamically
- for example after it is launched -

do you mean something like this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxypac/ ?

That would be manual,
but it's a good start.
activating / disabling proxies with a click of a button from the toolbar is a nice feature to have.

Thank you pan64 for the suggestion,
I settled with Proxy Toggle.
You configure a proxy once,
then you click on a button in the toolbar to enable/disable it.

Proxy use in Linux tends not to follow windows global.
Not sure there is any foolproof way to proxy every application in linux yet.

For just firefox then extensions exist like above or maybe foxyproxy.