Connect to Tor Network with Ruby

Connect to Tor network with ruby

I think it's like specifying proxy server for your HTTP connection. I don't know how it works in Ruby. But it will not be different from configuring browsers. Just set proxy server setting to 127.0.0.1:8118.

Ruby, Tor and Net::HTTP::Proxy

You are using HTTP proxy class, so you must provide IP of HTTP proxy. Tor Browser has not HTTP proxy bundled.

So you can either install some proxy software e.g. Privoxy and configure it to use Tor's SOCKS:

In config.txt
forward-socks4a / 127.0.0.1:9050 .

then use Privoxy's default listen-address in your script:

proxy = Net::HTTP::Proxy('127.0.0.1',8118)

or use SOCKSify.
According to docs:

require 'socksify/http'
uri = URI.parse('http://rubyforge.org/')
Net::HTTP.SOCKSProxy('127.0.0.1', 9050).start(uri.host, uri.port) do |http|
  http.get(uri.path)
end

No need for additional software..

Third solution is to use SOCKSify as follows:

$ socksify_ruby localhost 9050 script.rb

which redirect all TCP connections of a Ruby script, which means you don't need to use any Proxy code at all.

For clarification you have to understand that 127.0.0.1:9050 is Tor's SOCKS address and 127.0.0.1:8118 is address of Privoxy.

How to Build and Send an HTTP Request to a Tor Hidden Service with Ruby

Curl only uses a proxy if you set it up in your "curl"-block.

For example:

c = Curl::Easy.new() do |curl| 
    curl.proxy_tunnel = true
    curl.proxy_type = Curl::CURLPROXY_SOCKS5 # also available and default Curl::CURLPROXY_HTTP
    curl.proxy_url = '127.0.0.1:9050' # local tor client/proxy
    curl.headers["User-Agent"] = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0" #the user agent string from the most recent version of the tor browser
    curl.verbose = true
    curl.url = url # your example url
    curl.perform
    curl.inspect
end

Unfortunately curl does not use the proxy for hostname resolution. In other words, I did't find a way to force curl to use the proxy for hostname resolution.

But you can try

#enable socksify debug
Socksify::debug = true

#own try via direct use of socksify and Net::HTTP
uri = URI.parse('http://am4wuhz3zifexz5u.onion/') #a known, functioning hidden service

# some debug stuff - just ignore ;-)
puts uri
puts uri.host
puts uri.port
puts uri.path

res1 = Net::HTTP.SOCKSProxy('127.0.0.1', 9050).start(uri.host, uri.port) do |http| 
    http.get(uri.path)
end

Most anonymous way to crawl a search engine

If you want to be anonymous on Internet, one of the best choice is tor. You can use it by yourself and access to any website

First you have to connect to the tor network

tor --SOCKSPort 9050

Then you can use this gem: https://github.com/astro/socksify-ruby

And access any website anonymously:

require 'socksify/http'
require 'net/http'
Net::HTTP.SOCKSProxy('127.0.0.1', 9050).start('some.website.com', 80) do |http|
  http.get('/')
end

Please read tor documentation if you need to be anonymous for security reasons, it is complete and important if you want to use it correctly.

The target website can easily know the traffic is comming from tor network (but it won't known where the traffic come from), be reasonable while crawling, you don't want webmaster to block tor...

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