Using tor with python’s urllib2 is pretty easy, you just need to setup a few things before hand.
First off what is tor? Tor stands for " The Onion Router " and allows you to anonymously browse the internet by bouncing your request through multiple tor nodes.
I’m going to be using a Fedora 17 machine to demonstrate, and show output.
First lets install two packages from our package manager:
# yum install privoxy tor
Next we need to edit our privoxy config ( /etc/privoxy/config ) and add the following line:
forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .
We are now set to start the services:
service tor start
service privoxy start
Lets go ahead and fire up our Python interrupter and get to it:
In [1]: import urllib2
In [2]: proxy = urllib2.ProxyHandler({'http': '127.0.0.1:8118'})
In [3]: opener = urllib2.build_opener(proxy)
In [4]: urllib2.install_opener(opener)
In [5]: print urllib2.urlopen('http://icanhazip.com/').read()
78.108.63.46
To verify we are working we can request a new identity from the
tor process by sending the SIGHUP signal:
# ps aux | grep tor
root 5126 0.5 0.9 61752 19068 pts/1 S+ 15:24 0:00 tor
root 5289 0.0 0.0 109400 824 pts/3 R+ 15:26 0:00 grep --color=auto tor
# kill -s SIGHUP 5126
Now when we run our Python code we should have a new ip address:
In [6]: print urllib2.urlopen('http://icanhazip.com/').read()
91.213.137.129