Tell Git to bypass proxy for internal addresses

Summary: How to make Git bypass proxy settings when connecting to internal repositories.

A common question enterprise application developers ask that generally gets unsatisfactory answers is: how do you configure Git to use the corporate proxy settings to connect to the external repositories (such as Github) while bypassing the proxy when connecting to internal repositories (such as corporate Gitlab instances)? A typical answer would recommend configuring proxy settings on each repo. The problem with this approach is that it assumes that you already have a local repo, but how do you access a repo if you want to perform the initial clone other than changing global proxy settings?

One option would be to specify proxy in the git clone command. For example, to bypass the global proxy settings, run it like this:

git -c http.proxy= clone https://internalgithub.com/foo/bar.git

But there is an even better solution: you can specify proxy settings on a per-domain basis. The following instructions assume that you are using a Windows system (I suspect that Mac or Linux instructions would be slightly different, but the idea must be the same). Simply, open the .gitconfig file located in the root of your user profile folder (such as c:\Windows\Users\yourusername), and add lines similar to the following:

[http]
	proxy = http://your.corp.proxy.server.com:XXX
	sslBackend = schannel
[https]
	proxy = http://your.corp.proxy.server.com:YYY
[http "https://your.company.repo.host1.com/"]
	proxy = ""
	sslVerify = false
[http "https://your.company.repo.host2.com/"]
	proxy = ""
	sslVerify = false
[credential "https://your.company.repo.host1.com/"]
	provider = generic
[credential "https://your.company.repo.host2.com/"]
	provider = generic

Once you save the .gitconfig file, you will need to log off and log on to the system for the changes to take effect.

Notice that your global proxy settings are defined under both the http and https sections, while domain-specific sections only use http (when I added the https sections for domain-specific URLs, it stopped working). Also, the global proxy definition assumes that the proxy server does not require authentication (if it does, adjust the proxy definition appropriately).

How to stop and start tracking file changes for Git

Summary: Git commands that let you stop and start tracking project file chages.

During application development, there may be situations when you want to make a change in a file (e.g. modify an application setting) without accidentally committing this change to source control. There may be better ways to do this, but one option is to tell Git to stop tracking the file before you make the the change that you do not commit to the repo. Say, there is an appsettings.Developement.json file that you want to stop and start tracking. This is how I do it.

Create two files stop-tracking-appsettings.bat and start-tracking-appsettings.bat files in the solution folder (PROJECT_FOLDER must be replace by the name of the project directory under the solution folder).

stop-tracking-appsettings.bat

@echo off
git update-index --skip-worktree PROJECT_FOLDER\appsettings.Development.json

start-tracking-appsettings.bat

@echo off
git update-index --no-skip-worktree PROJECT_FOLDER\appsettings.Development.json

Now you can either run these files from a console whenever you want to stop and start tracking file changes. Even better, in Visual Studio, you can create a custom tool menu option (e.g. Run batch file) that you can invoke by right clicking the file in the Solution Explorer and selectin the context menu option (see this Stack Overflow answer explaining how to set it up).