Quick Tip: Using Azure PowerShell with Web Proxy and Fiddler

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Does your organization use a web proxy server for securing outbound Internet access?

Do you use third-party tools, such as Fiddler, that rely on HTTP/HTTPS proxying?

If you’ve answered yes! to either of these questions, you’ll find that you’ll likely need to make a couple quick tweaks to your Azure PowerShell scripts for successful connectivity when communicating through a proxied connection.

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In this article, I’ll provide 4 simple lines of code that you can add to the beginning of any Azure PowerShell scripts when you need to work with a proxy-based connection to the Microsoft Azure cloud.

Step 1 – Add Proxy URI to Script

Add the code below to the top of your Azure PowerShell script to define a proxy URI that your script can use for communicating with Microsoft Azure.  Depending on your proxy scenario, the value you use for the $proxyString variable may be different in your environment.  In the example below, I’m specifying the proxy URI value that’s commonly used with Fiddler.

$proxyString = "https://127.0.0.1:8888"

$proxyUri = new-object System.Uri($proxyString)

[System.Net.WebRequest]::DefaultWebProxy =
new-object System.Net.WebProxy ($proxyUri, $true)

Step 2 (Optional) – Add Proxy Credentials to Script

If the proxy configuration used in your environment requires authentication, you can also add one of the following lines to your script – depending on the type of authentication credentials required.

To use Windows credentials for proxy authentication, you can add …

[System.Net.WebRequest]::DefaultWebProxy.Credentials =
[System.Net.CredentialCache]::DefaultCredentials

Alternatively, to prompt for separate credentials that can be used for proxy authentication, you can add …

[System.Net.WebRequest]::DefaultWebProxy.Credentials =
Get-Credential

Done – Ready to test …

Once you’ve configured proxy-based connectivity using the steps above, you can test connectivity by attempting to authenticate to Microsoft Azure and retrieving a list of Azure subscriptions using the cmdlets below from Azure PowerShell v1.0.x:

Login-AzureRmAccount

Get-AzureRmSubscription