Git error: fatal: unable to connect a socket (Invalid argument)

Question

I've got MSysGit (Git on Windows) working just fine on my home machine, but at work, where we are behind a Microsoft ISA proxy, I get the following error when I do a Git clone:

H:
cd \
git clone git://github.com/akitaonrails/vimfiles.git

Output:

Initialized empty Git repository in H:/vimfiles/.git/
github.com[0: 65.74.177.129]: errno=Invalid argument
fatal: unable to connect a socket (Invalid argument)

I've tried setting the http_proxy environment variable to:

http://our-proxy-server:8088

I've set the Git http.proxy configuration directive:

git config --global http.proxy http://our-proxy-server:8088

Neither of the above makes a difference.

Doing a Git clone with http:// instead of git:// yields this:

H:
cd \
git clone http://github.com/akitaonrails/vimfiles.git

Output:

Initialized empty Git repository in H:/vimfiles/.git/
fatal: http://github.com/akitaonrails/vimfiles.git/info/refs download error - The    requested URL returned error: 407

407 is of course an authentication error.

Is there a way to get Git working from behind a proxy, specifically an ISA proxy? I don't know if it's going to be worth pursing this.

Answer 1

I had the exact same error; but the ~/.gitconfig global config file was the key.

If you have a proxy with authentication you need to put in it:

git config --global http.proxy http://login:password@our-proxy-server:8088

And it just works (with 'git clone http:')

Example of a blog detailing the same setup: GIT clone over HTTP: who knew?

---

If it still fails in 407, it could be related to a problem with git-fetch losing authentication tokens on the second HTTP GET. A more recent version of libcurl might be needed.

---

Update January 2011: jbustamovej mentions in his answer (upvoted) his blog post "GitHub Behind Corporate Proxy", which adds this:

It’s important to note that if your login has a backslash, as in domain\login, you must escape the backslash, as in:

git config --global http.proxy http://domain\\\login:password@our-proxy-server:8088

---

Also, the value of http.proxy can have "path" at the end for a socks proxy that listens to a unix-domain socket, but Git started to discard it when proxy was taught auth code path to use the credential helpers: that has been corrected with Git 2.47 (Q4 2024), batch 4.

See commit 0ca365c (02 Aug 2024) by Ryan Hendrickson (rhendric).
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 4bad011, 14 Aug 2024)}

http: do not ignore proxy path

^{Co-authored-by: Jeff King
Signed-off-by: Jeff King
Signed-off-by: Ryan Hendrickson}

The documentation for http.proxy describes that option, and the environment variables it overrides, as supporting "the syntax understood by curl".
curl allows SOCKS proxies to use a path to a Unix domain socket, like socks5h://localhost/path/to/socket.sock.
Git should therefore include, if present, the path part of the proxy URL in what it passes to libcurl.

git config now includes in its man page:

'[protocol://][user[:password]@]proxyhost[:port][/path]'. This can be overridden on a per-remote basis; see remote.<name>.proxy.

Answer 2

Even after configuring the proxy, you might be unable to connect, since the proxy is disallowing Git protocol traffic. In this case, you might want to try using "http" instead of "git"

H:
cd \
git clone http://github.com/akitaonrails/vimfiles.git

Also, if you are using an automated proxy config file (.pac), just open it in a text editor. It is quite a easy to following scripting language, with a bunch of conditions to redirect to the most efficient proxy. Find the one that allows general purpose traffic (typically, the last configured proxy), and configure it as mentioned in the comment above.

Answer 3

I've managed to get it working via a very convoluted route. Here's how:

1. I have OpenSSH running on my home machine (a Vista box) running under Cygwin
2. I am using Bitvise Tunnelier's Dynamic tunneling via integrated SOCKS/HTTP CONNECT proxy.
3. I then use Freecap (thanks Marko) to "SOCKify" GIT-GUI. Unfortunately, you have to setup each EXE file individually and run them from within Freecap, so you can't universally SOCKify all of the Git command line tools. You can setup explicit command-line commands within Freecap, but you have to setup each individually, which kind of defeats the purpose. This is why I've just setup GIT-GUI in this crazy elaborate system

Amazingly, it seems to work, although I've not tested everything yet. It'll clone, certainly, which is a start.

Answer 4

Python 2.7 and ntlmaps worked for me after getting 407 errors and other junk from GitHub.

File .gitconfig:

[http]
      proxy = http://127.0.0.1:5865

Answer 5

I had this problem on Windows 7:

git clone git://github.com/facebook/php-sdk.git

Output:

Initialized empty Git repository in c:/Users/Jay/temp/php-sdk/.git/
github.com[0: 207.97.227.239]: errno=No error
fatal: unable to connect a socket (No error)

I finally realized it was AVG AntiVirus software running. I disabled the "resident shield" within AVG, and it worked like a charm.

git clone git://github.com/facebook/php-sdk.git

Output:

Initialized empty Git repository in c:/Users/Jay/temp2/php-sdk/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 223, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (179/179), done.
emote: Total 223 (delta 84), reused 0 (delta 0)
Receiving objects: 100% (223/223), 37.32 KiB, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (84/84), done.

Answer 6

Do you have SOCKS proxy? If you have, you could try FreeCap to socksify your Git connection. I've been using Git this way for a while.

If not, still try FreeCap. IIRC it might be able to use HTTP proxies, but I haven't tried that.

I usually socksify cmd.exe using FreeCap, and from then on (almost) all cmdline programs that I start from that session are socksified too. That's why I recommended Free Cap, since SocksCap (another alternative) doesn't work that way.

As for using http.proxy, it for some reason never worked for me with the MinGW version and my company's HTTP proxies.

Answer 7

Here is what worked for me:

git config --global http.proxy http://login:password@PROXY_SERVER:PORT
git config --global http.sslVerify false