Using ProxyMapService to Fix pip Behind SOCKS5 Proxy

I ran into an issue where pip wasn’t working due to network restrictions. At the same time, I had access to a SOCKS5 proxy at:

192.168.1.100:1080

The problem was that pip doesn’t support SOCKS proxies out of the box. Normally, you’d install PySocks to enable that — but since pip itself wasn’t working, that wasn’t an option.

I used the ProxyMapService to expose the SOCKS5 proxy as a local HTTP proxy. Here’s the rule I configured:

{
  "Listen": {
    "Port": 10000,
    "RejectHttpProxy": false
  },
  "Authentication": {
    "Required": false,
    "Verify": false,
    "SetAuthentication": false
  },
  "ProxyServers": {
    "Items": [
      {
        "Host": "192.168.1.100",
        "Port": 1080,
        "ProxyType": "Socks5"
      }
    ]
  }
}

After that, pip started working by pointing it to the local HTTP proxy:

pip install cython --proxy http://127.0.0.1:10000
Collecting cython
  Using cached cython-3.2.4-cp311-cp311-win_amd64.whl.metadata (7.7 kB)
Using cached cython-3.2.4-cp311-cp311-win_amd64.whl (2.8 MB)
Installing collected packages: cython
Successfully installed cython-3.2.4

🎉