How to use PowerShell Invoke-WebRequest behind corporate proxy

Corportate proxies are one of the productivity killers for developers. They are not well supported in every utility and framework and each tool has its own litrature to set proxy settings. To add salt to the injury, not every tool supports NTLM authentication well which is quite common in many proxies. Companies have to sometimes make exception rules in proxy settings that can further complexify matters.

In case of PowerShell you do not have to worry much. Let’s see how you can set proxy for Invoke-WebRequest for example. Other commands usually support proxy settings similarly.

$pass = ConvertTo-SecureString "P@ssw0rd" -AsPlainText -Force
$cred = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -ArgumentList "contoso\george", $pass
Invoke-WebRequest https://registry.npmjs.org/express -Proxy "http://proxy.contoso.com:8080" -ProxyCredential $cred

In line 1, we store the password in a SecureString object. In Line 2, we create a new PSCredentual object by providing the username and password and finally in Line 3, we call Invoke-WebRequest using -Proxy and -ProxyCrendential parameters.

Let me give you another alternative. Did you know you can also ask the proxy settings required for a URL from your OS and even use the current user’s credentials?

$dest = "https://registry.npmjs.org/express"
$proxy = ([System.Net.WebRequest]::GetSystemWebproxy()).GetProxy($dest)
Invoke-WebRequest https://registry.npmjs.org/express -Proxy $proxy -ProxyUseDefaultCredentials