Attention: These instructions are meant for installing tor the network daemon i.e. little-t-tor. For instructions on installing Tor Browser, refer to Tor Browser user manual.

Admin access: To install Tor you need root privileges. Below all commands that need to be run as root user like apt and dpkg are prepended with '#', while commands to be run as user with '$' resembling the standard prompt in a terminal. To open a root terminal you have several options: sudo su, or sudo -i, or su -i. Note that sudo asks for your user password, while su expects the root password of your system.

Debian / Ubuntu

Do not use the packages in Ubuntu's universe. In the past they have not reliably been updated. That means you could be missing stability and security fixes.

  1. Configure Tor package repository

Enable the Tor Project APT repository by following the instructions.

  1. Package installation

    # apt install tor

Fedora

  1. Configure Tor Package repository

Enable the Tor Project's RPM package repository by following the instructions.

  1. Package installation

    # dnf install tor

FreeBSD

  1. Package installation

    # pkg install tor

OpenBSD

  1. Package installation

    # pkg_add tor

macOS

  1. Install a package manager

There are two package manager on OS X: Homebrew and Macports. You can use the package manager of your choice.

To install Homebrew follow the instructions on brew.sh.

To install Macports follow the instructions on macports.org/install.php.

  1. Package installation

If you are using Homebrew in a Terminal window, run:

# brew install tor

If you are using Macports in a Terminal window, run:

$ sudo port install tor

Arch Linux

  1. To install the tor package on Arch Linux, run:
# pacman -Syu tor

DragonFlyBSD

  1. Bootstrap pkg

DragonFlyBSD's daily snapshots and releases (starting with 3.4) come with pkg already installed. Upgrades from earlier releases, however, will not have it. If pkg is missing on the system for any reason, it can be quickly bootstrapped without having to build it from source or even having DPorts installed:

# cd /usr
# make pkg-bootstrap
# rehash
# pkg-static install -y pkg
# rehash

1.1 Recommended steps to setup pkg

Here, it will be similar to what we have on a FreeBSD system, and we are going to use HTTPS to fetch our packages, and updates - so here we also need an extra package to help us out (ca_root_nss).

Installing the ca_root_nss package:

# pkg install ca_root_nss

For fresh installations, the file /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/df-latest.conf.sample is copied to /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/df-latest. The files ending in the ".sample" extension are ignored; pkg(8) only reads files that end in ".conf" and it will read as many as it finds.

DragonflyBSD has 2 packages repositories:

  • Avalon (mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org);
  • Wolfpond (pkg.wolfpond.org).

We can simply edit the URL used to point out the repositories on /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/df-latest and that's it! Remember to use pkg+https:// for Avalon.

After applying all these changes, we update the packages list again and try to check if there's already a new update to apply:

# pkg update -f
# pkg upgrade -y -f
  1. Package installation

Install the tor package:

# pkg install tor

NetBSD

  1. Setup pkg_add

Modern versions of the NetBSD operating system can be set to use pkgin, which is a piece of software aimed to be like apt or yum for managing pkgsrc binary packages. We are not convering its setup here, and opt to use plain pkg_add instead.

# echo "PKG_PATH=http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/$(uname -m)/$(uname -r)/All" > /etc/pkg_install.conf
  1. Package installation

Install tor NetBSD's package:

# pkg_add tor

Void Linux

To install the tor package on Void Linux, please run:

# xbps-install -S tor

Installing Tor from source

  1. Download latest release and dependencies

The latest release of Tor can be found on the download page.

If you're building from source, first install libevent, and make sure you have openssl and zlib (including the -devel packages if applicable).

  1. Install Tor

    tar -xzf tor-0.4.3.6.tar.gz; cd tor-0.4.3.6

    ./configure && make

Now you can run tor as src/app/tor (0.4.3.x and later), or you can run make install (as root if necessary) to install it into /usr/local/, and then you can start it just by running tor.