Installing a Rails plugin from GitHub through a firewall and proxy

I was working on a Ruby on Rails project today with Nigel from Able Technology, and we wanted to install a plugin from GitHub.

We had a few problems because of a corporate firewall and an http proxy server. Only port 80, http traffic was allowed.

To do this in OSX the following steps were necessary:

1. Set the htttp_proxy variable in the shell:

export http_proxy=http://our.proxy:our_port

if your proxy requires a username and password the command is:

export http_proxy=http://username:password@your.proxy:your_port

2. Run the import using http instead of the git protocol:

script/plugin install http://github.com/adamlogic/showoff.git