React-native-windows: `react-native windows` does not work behind strict firewall

[yaakov-h]

When running the steps in the setup guide, react-native windows fails when reading data from the NPM registry when direct HTTPS access is unavailable.

As far as I can tell, there is no option to use a proxy server instead.

I have NPM working through a proxy with npm config set proxy and npm config set https-proxy, and can only set up react-native-windows by tampering with windows.js inside the rnpm-plugin-windows directory.

I've copied the full command-line output to this gist as I was having issues with multi-line markdown formatting.

[rozele]

There's actually no real reason to use https here, would changing the script to use http work?

[yaakov-h]

Nope, port 80 is also blocked on this network.

[rozele]

@yaakov-h if you have suggestions for what to use besides fetch for this step: https://github.com/ReactWindows/react-native-windows/blob/master/local-cli/rnpm/windows/src/windows.js#L39, it would be great if you could file a PR.

[yaakov-h]

@rozele: You could use fetch (url, { agent: someHttpAgentObjectThatHasProxyOptionsSet }), but I don't know node/npm/react well enough to know how to get the proxy options from npm or somewhere else.

[sasivarnan]

Facing the same issue here. Any update on this?
Here is an example of using proxy with node-fetch https://github.com/bitinn/node-fetch/issues/79#issuecomment-184594701

Update: I succeeded in running react-native windows command, by setting my proxy url to https_proxy environment variable, installing the https-proxy-agent to the base project and adding the following lines of code to windows.js file present within rnpm-plugin-windows node module.

const HttpsProxyAgent = require('https-proxy-agent');
const proxy = process.env.https_proxy;
const options  = {};
if(proxy){
  options.agent = new HttpsProxyAgent(proxy);
}

Use the options object as a second parameter to the fetch method.

return fetch('https://registry.npmjs.org/react-native-windows?version=latest', options)

[matthargett]

Sounds like you figured it out -- care to submit a PR?

[sasivarnan]

@matthargett I have raised a PR #963. Kindly check it out.

[matthargett]

fixed by #963