I'm trying to run Tor through python. My goal is to be able to switch exits or otherwise alter my IP from time-to-time at a time of my choosing. I've followed several tutorials and encountered several different errors.
This code prints my IP address
import requests
r = requests.get('http://icanhazip.com/')
r.content
# returns my regular IP
I've downloaded and 'installed' the Tor browser (although it seems to run from an .exe). When it is running, I can use the following code to return my Tor IP, which seems to change every 10 minutes or so, so everything seems to be working so far
import socks
import socket
socks.set_default_proxy(socks.SOCKS5, "127.0.0.1", 9150)
socket.socket = socks.socksocket
r = requests.get('http://icanhazip.com/')
print r.content
# Returns a different IP
Now, I've found instructions here on how to request a new identity programmatically, but this is where things begin to go wrong. I run the following code
from stem import Signal
from stem.control import Controller
with Controller.from_port(port = 9151) as controller:
controller.authenticate()
controller.signal(Signal.NEWNYM)
and I get the error "SOCKS5Error: 0x01: General SOCKS server failure" at the line that creates the controller. I thought this might be a configuration problem - the instructions say that there should be a config file called 'torrc' that contains the port numbers, apart from other things.
Eventually, in the directory C:\Users\..myname..\Desktop\Tor Browser\Browser\TorBrowser\Data\Tor I found three files, a 'torrc', a 'torrc-defaults', and a 'torrc.orig.1'. My 'torrc-defaults' looks similar to the 'torrc' shown in the documentation, my 'torrc.orig.1' is empty, and my 'torrc' has two lines of comments that look as follows with some more settings afterwards but no port settings
# This file was generated by Tor; if you edit it, comments will not be preserved
# The old torrc file was renamed to torrc.orig.1 or similar, and Tor will ignore it
...
I've tried to make sure that the two ports listed in the 'torrc-defaults' match the ports in the socks statement at the beginning and the controller statment further on. When these are 9150 and 9151 respectively I get the general SOCKS server failure listed above.
When I try and run the Controller with the wrong port (in this case, 9051 which was recommended in other posts but for me leads to Tor browser failing to load when I adjust the 'torrc-defaults') then I instead get the error message "[Errno 10061] No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it"
Finally, when I run the Controller with Tor browser running in the background but without first running the SOCKS statement, I instead get a lot of warning text and finally an error, as shown in part below:
...
...
250 __OwningControllerProcess
DEBUG:stem:GETCONF __owningcontrollerprocess (runtime: 0.0010)
TRACE:stem:Sent to tor:
SIGNAL NEWNYM
TRACE:stem:Received from tor:
250 OK
TRACE:stem:Received from tor:
650 SIGNAL NEWNYM
TRACE:stem:Sent to tor:
QUIT
TRACE:stem:Received from tor:
250 closing connection
INFO:stem:Error while receiving a control message (SocketClosed): empty socket content
At first I thought this looked quite promising - I put in a quick check line like this both before and after the new user request
print requests.get('http://icanhazip.com/').content
It prints the IP, but unfortunately it's the same both before and afterwards.
I'm pretty lost here - any support would be appreciated!
Thanks.
