Tag: Networking

The problem: httpfs ignores your environment variables

If you work with DuckDB and the httpfs extension to read remote Parquet files, CSVs from S3, or any HTTP resource, you probably assume that the HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY environment variables work just like every other tool. Curl respects them. wget respects them. Python requests respects them. Node.js respects them.

DuckDB does not.

I ran into this while working in a corporate environment with a mandatory proxy. I had a script reading Parquet files from Google Cloud Storage using httpfs, and it simply would not work. No clear error, no descriptive timeout, just silence. Meanwhile, a curl to the same resource with the same environment variables returned data without issue.