Since I’ve been frequently downloading various models with Python recently, I finally decided to solve the long-standing issue of WSL2 not being able to use the Windows host’s proxy. After wasting half an afternoon, I finally got it working. With the help of my capable assistant Gemini, the main steps are as follows:

1. .wslconfig settings in Windows
2. Core settings of v2rayN
3. Firewall settings in Windows
4. Cleaning up old settings in WSL2
5. ~/.bashrc settings in WSL2
6. curl -v testing in WSL2

References:

Advanced settings configuration in WSL | Microsoft Learn

WSL2 使用 V2RayN 局域网 proxychains 代理方案 · Issue #2653 · 2dust/v2rayN

记一次用wsl2中共享宿主机的代理-v2rayN - 沉迷于学习，无法自拔^_^

.wslconfig

1. Access your personal account folder in Windows. Press Win + R, enter %UserProfile%, and hit Enter.

2. Check if there is a .wslconfig file. If not, create a new text file and name it .wslconfig.

3. Paste the following content into .wslconfig:

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   [wsl2] # Enable mirrored networking mode networkingMode=mirrored # Allow WSL2 to access Windows localhost localhostForwarding=true # Automatically synchronize proxy settings (optional: true/false) autoProxy=true

   Note that the autoProxy parameter determines how WSL2 handles the proxy. Setting it to true means you don’t need to configure ~/.bashrc anymore, but the problems are:

   1. When we use the env | grep -i proxy command, we will see many strange network-related variables, even though the proxy does successfully work.
   2. The proxy cannot be toggled on or off within WSL2, causing a lot of traffic to go through the proxy unnecessarily.

   Later, we will set it to false so that we can easily control the proxy switch inside WSL2, ensuring a clear and transparent WSL2 system.

4. In the Windows terminal, enter wsl --shutdown to shut down WSL2.

v2rayN

1. In the basic settings of v2rayN (version V7.15.7 at the time of writing), enable “Allow connections from the LAN” and “Open a new port for the LAN” (optional).
2. At the bottom left of the v2rayN client’s main interface, you can see the port open for the internet, which is 10810 in my case.
3. The system proxy here is “Set system proxy automatically”, and the routing mode is “Bypass (Whitelist)”.
4. Then select a node and keep v2rayN running.

FireWall

1. Type “firewall” in the Windows search box and select Windows Defender Firewall.
2. Click “Allow an app or feature through Windows Defender Firewall”.
3. Find or add v2rayN.exe and its core programs (such as v2ray.exe or xray.exe), ensuring that both Private and Public are checked. The usual paths are under v2rayN\ and v2rayN\bin\xray, respectively.
4. In the advanced settings of the firewall, create a new inbound rule to allow TCP traffic on port 10810 (corresponding to v2rayN).

wsl2

Cleaning Up Old Settings

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# 1. Clear old, messy proxy environment variables
unset http_proxy
unset https_proxy
unset no_proxy

# 2. Re-set correct proxy (pointing to localhost port in mirrored mode)
export http_proxy="http://127.0.0.1:10810"
export https_proxy="http://127.0.0.1:10810"

Ensure that you have enabled mirrored networking mode in the first step and successfully restarted WSL2. Of course, this step is not strictly necessary either, because ~/.bashrc will automatically handle these old variables later.

~/.bashrc

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# Same applies to other editors
sudo vim ~/.bashrc

After multiple experiments with Gemini, here is the content to append to the bottom of ~/.bashrc:

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function proxy_on() {
    # Thoroughly clean up any residual variables (prevent conflicts from mixed case)
    unset http_proxy https_proxy ALL_PROXY NO_PROXY HTTP_PROXY HTTPS_PROXY all_proxy no_proxy
    
    # Set the port you verified works (since 10810 was tested successfully, use 10810)
    export hostip="127.0.0.1"
    export port="10810"
    
    export http_proxy="http://$hostip:$port"
    export https_proxy="http://$hostip:$port"
    export all_proxy="socks5://$hostip:$port"
    
    # no_proxy here only keeps localhost
    export no_proxy="localhost,127.0.0.1"
    
    echo "WSL Proxy: ON (127.0.0.1:10810)"
}

function proxy_off() {
    unset http_proxy https_proxy ALL_PROXY NO_PROXY HTTP_PROXY HTTPS_PROXY all_proxy no_proxy
    echo "WSL Proxy: OFF"
}

After saving the above content, enter:

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source ~/.bashrc

And then:

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curl -I https://www.google.com

The following output should appear, indicating a successful connection:

I also tested it with ping, which didn’t work but doesn’t affect its usability.

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HTTP/1.1 200 Connection established

I tried downloading the model again, and it successfully worked:

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import gensim.downloader as api
wv_from_bin = api.load("glove-wiki-gigaword-200")

Solution If It Still Fails

The most effective method is, after completing the above steps, to enter the following in WSL2:

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curl -v https://www.google.com

Then feed the output result to an AI, and it will tell you what to do.