Little-t-tor

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.

Attention: These instructions are to verify the tor source code. Please follow the right instructions to verify Tor Browser's signature.

Digital signature is a process ensuring that a certain package was generated by its developers and has not been tampered with. Below we explain why it is important and how to verify that the tor source code you download is the one we have created and has not been modified by some attacker.

Each file on our download page is accompanied by two files which are labelled "checksum" and "sig" with the same name as the package and the extension ".sha256sum" and ".sha256sum.asc" respectively.

The .asc file will verify that the .sha256sum file (containing the checksum of the package) has not been tampered with. Once the signature has been validated (see below on how to do it), the package integrity can be validated with:

$ sha256sum -c *.sha256sum

These files allow you to verify the file you've downloaded is exactly the one that we intended you to get. This will vary by web browser, but generally you can download this file by right-clicking the "sig" and "checksum" link and selecting the "save file as" option.

For example, tor-0.4.6.7.tar.gz is accompanied by tor-0.4.6.7.tar.gz.sha256sum.asc. These are example file names and will not exactly match the file names that you download.

We now show how you can verify the downloaded file's digital signature on different operating systems. Please notice that a signature is dated the moment the package has been signed. Therefore every time a new file is uploaded a new signature is generated with a different date. As long as you have verified the signature you should not worry that the reported date may vary.

Installing GnuPG

First of all you need to have GnuPG installed before you can verify signatures.

For Windows users:

If you run Windows, download Gpg4win and run its installer.

In order to verify the signature you will need to type a few commands in windows command-line, cmd.exe.

For macOS users:

If you are using macOS, you can install GPGTools.

In order to verify the signature you will need to type a few commands in the Terminal (under "Applications").

For GNU/Linux users:

If you are using GNU/Linux, then you probably already have GnuPG in your system, as most GNU/Linux distributions come with it preinstalled.

In order to verify the signature you will need to type a few commands in a terminal window. How to do this will vary depending on your distribution.

Fetching the Tor Developers key

The following keys can sign the tarball. Don't expect them all, it can vary depending on who is available to make the release.

You can fetch the key with the links provided above or with:

$ gpg --auto-key-locate nodefault,wkd --locate-keys ahf@torproject.org
$ gpg --auto-key-locate nodefault,wkd --locate-keys dgoulet@torproject.org
$ gpg --auto-key-locate nodefault,wkd --locate-keys nickm@torproject.org

This should show you something like (for nickm):

gpg: key FE43009C4607B1FB: public key "Nick Mathewson <nickm@torproject.org>" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:               imported: 1
pub   rsa4096 2016-09-21 [C] [expires: 2025-10-04]
      2133BC600AB133E1D826D173FE43009C4607B1FB
uid           [ unknown] Nick Mathewson <nickm@torproject.org>
sub   rsa4096 2016-09-23 [S] [expires: 2025-10-04]
sub   rsa4096 2016-09-23 [E] [expires: 2025-10-04]

If you get an error message, something has gone wrong and you cannot continue until you've figured out why this didn't work. You might be able to import the key using the Workaround (using a public key) section instead.

After importing the key, you can save it to a file (identifying it by its fingerprint here):

$ gpg --output ./tor.keyring --export 0x2133BC600AB133E1D826D173FE43009C4607B1FB

This command results in the key being saved to a file found at the path ./tor.keyring, i.e. in the current directory. If ./tor.keyring doesn't exist after running this command, something has gone wrong and you cannot continue until you've figured out why this didn't work.

Verifying the signature

To verify the signature of the package you downloaded, you will need to download the corresponding .sha256sum.asc signature file and the .sha256sum file itself, and verify it with a command that asks GnuPG to verify the file that you downloaded.

The examples below assume that you downloaded these two files to your "Downloads" folder. Note that these commands use example file names and yours will be different: you will have downloaded a different version than 9.0 and you may not have chosen the English (en-US) version.

For Windows users:

gpgv --keyring .\tor.keyring Downloads\tor-0.4.6.10.tar.gz.sha256sum.asc Downloads\tor-0.4.6.10.tar.gz.sha256sum

For macOS users:

gpgv --keyring ./tor.keyring ~/Downloads/tor-0.4.6.10.tar.gz.sha256sum.asc ~/Downloads/tor-0.4.6.10.tar.gz.sha256sum

For BSD/Linux users:

gpgv --keyring ./tor.keyring ~/Downloads/tor-0.4.6.10.tar.gz.sha256sum.asc ~/Downloads/tor-0.4.6.10.tar.gz.sha256sum

The result of the command should produce something like this (depending on which key signed it):

gpgv: Signature made Mon 16 Aug 2021 04:44:27 PM -03
gpgv:                using RSA key 7A02B3521DC75C542BA015456AFEE6D49E92B601
gpgv: Good signature from "Nick Mathewson <nickm@torproject.org>"

If you get error messages containing 'No such file or directory', either something went wrong with one of the previous steps, or you forgot that these commands use example file names and yours will be a little different.

You may also want to learn more about GnuPG.

Verifying checksum

Now that we validated the signatures of the checksum, we need to verify the integrity of the package.

For Windows users:

certUtil -hashfile tor-0.4.6.10.tar.gz.sha256sum SHA256

For macOS users:

shasum -a 256 tor-0.4.6.10.tar.gz.sha256sum

For BSD/Linux users:

sha256sum -c tor-0.4.6.10.tar.gz.sha256sum