Procedure for installing agent repositories with pe_repo doen't work behind a proxy

Overview

The instructions provided at https://docs.puppetlabs.com/pe/latest/quick_start_install_agents_nix.html#installing-agents-with-different-os-and-architecture-than-the-puppet-master do not work when the puppet master must use a proxy server to access the internet.

Expected result

The instructions should result in the additional agents being downloaded and made available locally.

Actual result

Downloads will eventually fail, there will be several red error messages from puppet on every subsequent run indicating that an exec curl has failed.

Workaround

Adding proxy information http_proxy_host to the [user] section to make agent-run programs such as curl work with a proxy doesn't work for the agent installers as they use https connections (pe-master classify with pe:repos).

It's possible to manually export https_proxy variable for the root user to get agent runs to succeed. This approach only works for interactive logins. For 'real' puppet runs we need to export shell variables by putting

export http_proxy ...

export https_proxy ...

in /etc/sysconfig/pe-puppet which is sourced on load by the pe-puppet init script. After changing this file, you must restart pe-puppet:
service pe-puppet restart