Connect-tor

Connect to a local tor binary on the system. Do path discovery and provide a common interface to remove platform-specific clumsiness when dealing with the external process.

Usage

var connecttor = require('connecttor');
connecttor.connect(function (socket) {
  // returns a net.socket connected to Tor's control port.
});

Design

Connecttor uses a platform-dependent mechanism to connect with tor. Sorry.

On known linux distributions (currently debian variants), connecttor expects to use the system-bundled tor distribution. These implementations compartmentalize security, by running the tor process as a different user, so that even if the node process is compromised, it will not be able to read the private keys to subsequently impersonate onion addresses. Several Caveats apply. The first is that apt-get install tor does not set up an installation which can be controlled by other users. In addition, the user running node will need to be in the debian-tor unix group in order to connect to the tor control socket.

On Mac and Windows distributions where tor does not attempt to user-isolate its keys, connecttor will attempt to find an installation of tor browser bundle or tor binary in standard locations, and will download a local copy if one is not found. It will then run its own instance of tor with a custom torrc configuration.

Debian installation

1. Make sure tor is installed:

apt-get install tor

2. Add the user running node to the debian-tor group:

usermod -a -G debian-tor `whoami`