personally more interested in this so that Zig supports Tor

What is the progress on this? I am also suffering from censorship of github.
Besides directly setting a proxy on zig package manager, is there a way to manually download the dependencies and have the package manager skip over the downloading part?

Besides directly setting a proxy on zig package manager, is there a way manually to download the dependencies and have the package manager skips over the downloading part?

You can download the dependency into ~/.cache/zig/p, unzip it, and rename the folder to the hash value. Then zig build will use the local copies instead of trying to download.

Here is my workaround for the proxy issue. After building my patched zig from source, I could use zig build --build-proxy http://127.0.0.1:1080 to fetch pacakages via proxy.

I'm still confused that there are two zig build commands. One is for fetch packages and another is for build runner.

https://github.com/tizee/zig/tree/feature/http-socks5-proxy-support

zig build should detect and use http_proxy and https_proxy environment variables. My entire network is behind a proxy that doesn't let anything else through, and I assume this is also the case in many universities and work offices. It's a shame not to be able to use the Zig build system simply because it can't read the signposts of the internet route.

My temporary workaround is to manually download the package, host it locally and change the dependency URL accordingly:

{
  .binned_allocator = .{
    .url = "http://localhost:8080/8372900fcc09e38d7b0b6bbaddad3904-6c3321e0969ff2463f8335da5601986cf2108690.tar.gz",
    .hash = "1220363c7e27b2d3f39de6ff6e90f9537a0634199860fea237a55ddb1e1717f5d6a5",
  },
}

If anyone wants to implement http_proxy, https_proxy and no_proxy properly, it should be relatively easy, since zig's http client already supports proxies, and there is Go's proxy parsing and matching reference implementation: https://cs.opensource.google/go/x/net/+/refs/tags/v0.15.0:http/httpproxy/proxy.go

any update?

A dirty script to workaround the issue.

#!/bin/bash

set -e

forceupdate=false
if [ "$1" = "-f" ]; then
    forceupdate=true
    shift
fi

do_fetch() {
    for d in `grep -o 'url *=.*' $1 | cut -d = -f 2`; do
        d=`echo $d | grep -o 'https://[^"]*'`
        echo -e "\n>>> Deal with $d"
        if echo $d | grep -q '\.tar\.gz$'; then
            url=$d
        elif echo $d | grep -q '#[.0-9a-z]*$'; then
            url_base=`echo $d | awk -F \# '{print $1}'`
            url_base=${url_base%.git}
            url_commit=`echo $d | awk -F \# '{print $2}'`
            url="${url_base}/archive/${url_commit}.tar.gz"
        else
            echo ">>> Ignored $d, unable to resolve it!"
            continue
        fi
        hash=`grep -m 1 -A 1 "$d" $1 | grep hash |  awk -F \" '{print $(NF-1)}'`
        if [ -z "$hash" ]; then
          forceupdate=true
        fi
        if ! $forceupdate && [ -e ~/.cache/zig/p/$hash ]; then
          echo ">>> Found $url in cache, ignored"
          continue
        fi
        wget $url
        tarfile=${url##*/}
        hash=`zig fetch --debug-hash $tarfile | tail -n 1`
        echo ">> hash of $d:"
        echo -e "\t$hash"
        rm $tarfile
        if [ -e ~/.cache/zig/p/$hash/build.zig.zon ]; then
            do_fetch ~/.cache/zig/p/$hash/build.zig.zon
        fi
    done

    for d in `grep -o 'path *=.*' $1 | cut -d = -f 2`; do
        path=`echo $d | awk -F \" '{print $(NF-1)}'`
        if [ -e $path/build.zig.zon ]; then
            do_fetch $path/build.zig.zon
        fi
    done
}

zonfile=$1
if [ -z "$zonfile" ]; then
    zonfile=build.zig.zon
fi

if ! [ -e $zonfile ]; then
    echo "can't find build.zig.zon!"
    exit 1
fi

do_fetch $zonfile

EDIT 1: Eliminate redundant downloading
EDIT 2: Force update if hash is empty, output checksum hash for reference

or manually manage plugins like this project.
https://github.com/Srekel/tides-of-revival/blob/2aec79d644bbf5358ff502952386e138ebbf247f/sync_external.py#L63

A dirty script to workaround the issue.

#!/bin/bash

set -e

forceupdate=false
if [ "$1" = "-f" ]; then
    forceupdate=true
    shift
fi

do_fetch() {
    for d in `grep -o 'url *=.*' $1 | cut -d = -f 2`; do
        d=`echo $d | grep -o 'https://[^"]*'`
        echo -e "\n>>> Deal with $d"
        if echo $d | grep -q '\.tar\.gz$'; then
            url=$d
        elif echo $d | grep -q '#[.0-9a-z]*$'; then
            url_base=`echo $d | awk -F \# '{print $1}'`
            url_base=${url_base%.git}
            url_commit=`echo $d | awk -F \# '{print $2}'`
            url="${url_base}/archive/${url_commit}.tar.gz"
        else
            echo ">>> Ignored $d, unable to resolve it!"
            continue
        fi
        hash=`grep -m 1 -A 1 "$d" $1 | grep hash |  awk -F \" '{print $(NF-1)}'`
        if [ -z "$hash" ]; then
          forceupdate=true
        fi
        if ! $forceupdate && [ -e ~/.cache/zig/p/$hash ]; then
          echo ">>> Found $url in cache, ignored"
          continue
        fi
        wget $url
        tarfile=${url##*/}
        hash=`zig fetch --debug-hash $tarfile | tail -n 1`
        echo ">> hash of $d:"
        echo -e "\t$hash"
        rm $tarfile
        if [ -e ~/.cache/zig/p/$hash/build.zig.zon ]; then
            do_fetch ~/.cache/zig/p/$hash/build.zig.zon
        fi
    done

    for d in `grep -o 'path *=.*' $1 | cut -d = -f 2`; do
        path=`echo $d | awk -F \" '{print $(NF-1)}'`
        if [ -e $path/build.zig.zon ]; then
            do_fetch $path/build.zig.zon
        fi
    done
}

zonfile=$1
if [ -z "$zonfile" ]; then
    zonfile=build.zig.zon
fi

if ! [ -e $zonfile ]; then
    echo "can't find build.zig.zon!"
    exit 1
fi

do_fetch $zonfile

EDIT 1: Eliminate redundant downloading EDIT 2: Force update if hash is empty, output checksum hash for reference

For someone using this script, a little fix to find the global caching directory instead of hardcoded ~/.cache/zig: global_cache_dir=$(zig env | jq -r .global_cache_dir)