description: Enable traffic through a proxy server via HTTP_PROXY environment variable

HTTP Proxy

Fluent Bit supports setting up a HTTP proxy for all egress HTTP/HTTPS traffic by setting HTTP_PROXY environment variable:

• You can set up basic authentication with HTTP_PROXY=http://<username>:<password>@<proxy host>:<port> to provide your username and password when connecting to the proxy.
• You can also set up HTTP_PROXY=http://<proxy host>:<port> to omit username and password if there is none.

The HTTP_PROXY environment variable is a standard way for setting a HTTP proxy in a containerized environment, and it is also natively supported by any application written in Go. Therefore, we follow and implement the same convention for Fluent Bit.

Note: HTTP proxy is also supported using the HTTP output plugin. This configuration continues to work, however it should not be used together with the HTTP_PROXY environment variable. This is because under the hood, the HTTP_PROXY environment variable based proxy support is implemented by setting up a TCP connection tunnel via HTTP CONNECT. Unlike the plugin’s implementation, this supports both HTTP and HTTPS egress traffic.