Running DefectDojo Behind a Forward HTTPS Proxy (Pro)

If your DefectDojo Pro on-prem deployment cannot make direct outbound connections to the internet — for example, because firewall rules require all egress to go through a forward HTTPS proxy — you can configure the standard HTTPS_PROXY, HTTP_PROXY, and NO_PROXY environment variables. DefectDojo will route its outbound calls through the proxy accordingly.

This applies to all of DefectDojo’s outbound integrations, including:

• Jira — creating issues, fetching transitions, polling status, pushing comments
• SonarQube and other tool-side calls during scan import
• Pro Connectors — data pulls from cloud-hosted security tools (Snyk, Tenable, AWS Security Hub, etc.)

Setting the proxy environment variables#

On dojo-compose-cli–based deployments, set the proxy variables in your deployment’s environment configuration before bringing up the stack:

dojo-compose-cli propagates these values to the containers it manages via its proxyenv mechanism. Setting HTTPS_PROXY once at the deployment level reaches the containers that need it:

• the uwsgi container — Jira, SonarQube, and other web-side outbound calls
• the celeryworker containers — async background tasks that make outbound calls (Jira pushes, scheduled notifications, etc.)
• the Connector containers — cloud-tool API calls run by the Pro Connector framework

After updating the proxy variables, restart the stack so the new environment is picked up by every container.

Verifying the proxy is in use#

Once the stack is restarted:

1. Trigger a known outbound call. Pushing a test Finding to Jira, or running a Connector sync against a tool whose API you know the proxy can reach, both work well as test signals.
2. Check your proxy server’s access logs to confirm DefectDojo’s containers are routing traffic through it.
3. Check the relevant DefectDojo container logs — uwsgi for synchronous calls (Jira push from the UI, SonarQube import), celeryworker for async calls (Jira-related background tasks) — for any TLS or network errors that would indicate the proxy is not reachable or is rejecting the request.

If outbound calls fail with TLS errors after configuring the proxy, the most common causes are:

• The proxy’s TLS certificate is not trusted by the container. You may need to inject a CA bundle into the containers depending on your proxy’s TLS configuration.
• NO_PROXY is not configured for internal hosts, so DefectDojo is trying to reach internal services through the proxy and failing.

Known limitation: inbound Jira webhooks#

The proxy configuration documented here applies to outbound calls from DefectDojo to external services. It does not help with inbound webhooks that external systems push into DefectDojo.

The most common case where this matters is Jira’s bidirectional sync, which relies on Jira posting webhooks to DefectDojo’s /jira/webhook/<secret> endpoint when issues change. If DefectDojo is behind a firewall that prevents Jira from reaching it directly, setting HTTPS_PROXY will not solve that — you will need to address the inbound networking separately (a reverse proxy / load balancer with the appropriate firewall rules, an inbound NAT rule, or similar).

For Jira-specific troubleshooting, see Troubleshooting Jira errors.