Using bzr and launchpad behind a proxy

Bazaar is the distributed VCS which is used if you want to host your software on Canonical sponsored Launchpad service (https://launchpad.net/).

If you are behind a corporate firewall, there are some problems when trying to fetch/push on a launchpad hosted project. Behind a firewall, only the SSH protocol can be used, even to fetch. As such you will first need to have a valid launchpad account.

There are some interesting information about the problems behind a firewall in this article: http://xiaohui-liu.blogspot.com/2009/04/bzr-under-firewall.html.

To use bzr behind a firewall, you will need some similar configuration as with git. For example, if you want to get source code from launchpad, you need to edit the file $HOME/.ssh/config and add this:

Host *.launchpad.net ProxyCommand corkscrew %h %p User 

Of course like with git, you need to have corkscrew installed. If you run Ubuntu (or any other Debian based distro): sudo apt-get install corkscrew

Now if you want to fetch a branch on a Launchpad hosted project, just run: bzr branch bzr+ssh://bazaar.launchpad.net/~project-rootstock-developers/project-rootstock/trunk