Proxy

In enterprises, proxies are a standard to secure and control network traffic.

A problem with a proxy can occur at two points in time:

• Installing AskUI
• AskUI Controller connection to AskUI Inference

Installing AskUI Through NTLM or Kerberos Proxy Server

A Windows New Technology LAN Manager (NTLM) or Kerberos proxy requires you to authenticate yourself. This is done via your currently logged in Windows user or the username/password combination (Linux, macOS). The easiest way to do this is to install a local proxy that handles the handshake with the proxy for you.

Install Local Proxy

We recommend Px as a local proxy. Install it in your preferred way and start it. The default port it runs on is 3128.

tip

Choose the binary option if a package manager is not feasible in your environment.

Windows Startup

You can add Px to the startup for the binary zipped option in Windows like this:

1. Create a px-start.bat file within the unzipped folder, e.g., c:\tools\px with the content:

   cd c:\tools\px (or whatever path you unzipped the archive to)
   px.exe

2. Double-Click on the px-start.bat file to start Px

3. Optional: Set up Px to autostart on system startup so you don’t have to start it manually each time you want to use it

   1. Create a link to px-start.bat
   2. Open the startup folder with Windows logo key + R, enter shell:startup
   3. Move the link to px-start.bat into this folder

Create .npmrc file for npm

Create a .npmrc file in your AskUI project. You want to make sure that:

• registry and noproxy point to your companies registry (i.e. Artifactory)
• proxy and https-proxy point to the local Px proxy

registry=<company-registry-url>
proxy=http://127.0.0.1:3128
https-proxy=http://127.0.0.1:3128
noproxy=<company-registry-url>

Set Environment Variables

Setting the proxy inside .npmrc does not cover all cases. Sometimes a separate node command spawns a new process which does not inherit the proxy settings. Therefore you need to set the environment variable HTTPS_PROXY like this:

• Windows instructions

# Linux and macOS
# Add it to your favourite shell
# at startup if necessary
export HTTPS_PROXY=http://127.0.0.1:3128

AskUI Controller Connection to AskUI Inference

We describe two ways to connect to our backend AskUI Inference.

Using Default Configuration with hpagent

Per default, our library uses hpagent to support the use of HTTP and HTTPS proxies. hpagent is an open source package which provides HTTP(S) proxies that keeps connections alive. To use it, you need to

1. install hpagent

npm install --save-dev hpagent 

2. configure which proxies to use by setting the proxies' URLs using the environment variables HTTP_PROXY or HTTPS_PROXY

export HTTP_PROXY=http://<your-proxy-url>
export HTTPS_PROXY=https://<your-proxy-url>

Manually Configuring the HTTP and HTTPS Agent

If you need even more control, you can also configure an HTTP agent and HTTPS agent supporting your proxy manually for either one or both,

• the AskUI Controller (configuring the UiController) running on the OS you would like to control and
• the Inference API (configuring the UiControlClient) running on our servers and providing the vision to run your tests.

In the following example we are going to use hpagent again but you can use any HTTP and HTTPS agents that support proxies, e.g., the http.Agent or the https.Agent provided by the http and https module of Node.js, respectively.

1. Install hpagent

npm install --save-dev hpagent 

2. Import hpagent (or the agent(s) you would like to use) and configure the UiController and/or the UiControlClient inside the test/helpers/askui-helper.ts file.

import { HttpProxyAgent, HttpsProxyAgent } from 'hpagent'; // <-- Add imports
// other code

beforeAll(async () => {
  // Add this block
  const httpProxyUrl = "http://<your-proxy-url>" // <-- Adapt http proxy url
  const httpsProxyUrl = "https://<your-proxy-url>" // <-- Adapt https proxy url

  const proxyAgents = {
    http: new HttpProxyAgent({
      proxy: httpProxyUrl,
    }),
    https: new HttpsProxyAgent({
      proxy: httpsProxyUrl,
    }),
  }

  // other code

  uiController = new UiController({
    proxyAgents // <-- Set proxy agents
  });
  
  // other code

  aui = await UiControlClient.build({
    proxyAgents // <-- Set proxy agents
  });

  // other code
})

Here are some example for the httpProxyUrl (for more details see docs from hpagent)

Proxy Type	URL	Description
HTTP	e.g. http://proxy.company.com:8293	A HTTP proxy without authentication
HTTP + Basic Auth	e.g. http://username:password@proxy.company.com:8293	A HTTP proxy with authentication
SOCKET		Socket proxies are not supported by hpagent

Here are some example for the httpsProxyUrl (for more details see docs from hpagent)

Proxy Type	URL	Description
HTTPS	e.g. https://proxy.company.com:8293	A HTTPS proxy without authentication
HTTPS + Basic Auth	e.g. https://username:password@proxy.company.com:8293	A HTTP proxy with authentication.
SOCKET		Socket proxies are not supported by hpagent

Deep Package Inspection

Company proxies, like Zscalar, use deep package inspection to analyze the network traffic. Such proxies are adding self-signed certificates to the HTTPS request to break up the TLS connection.

This can result in the following error messages:

 RequestError: self signed certificate

or

 RequestError: unable to verify the first certificate

There are multiple options to deal with this:

Deactivate TLS certificate validation (NOT RECOMMENDED)

This option deactivates the TLS validation (see here) and is not recommended. Only for testing!

Windows:

set NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED 0

macOS/Unix:

export NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED=0

Add Self-Signed Certificate as Extra CA Certs (RECOMMENDED)

The other option is to add the self-signed certificate as extra certificates for Node.js.

1. Get the certificate and convert it to a .pem file, e.g., by exporting it with Chrome.
2. Set the NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS with the following commands:

Windows:

set NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS '<path>\<cert>.pem'

macOS/Unix:

export NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS='<path>/<cert>.pem'

Additional information:

• Get Zscalar custom certificate