Question

I need to use a function to start and stop Tor via web interface. For some reason the following instruction doesn’t work (no Tor process was spawned):

if ($_GET['tor'] == 'start') {
    shell_exec('/usr/bin/tor > /dev/null 2>&1 &');
...

But it works when I run the exact same string via shell:

$ php -r "shell_exec('killall tor > /dev/null 2>&1 &');"

How to solve the problem?

Thanks in advance.
K

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The problem was related with /var/tor directory permissions. Since its being spawned by apache user, which doesn’t have any home/.tor, he tries to create var/tor.
I was only able to get tor’s output when starting tor using python (os.system(“tor”)).

Answer 1

Tor needs write permission to the home directory of the user running tor. This is often not the case for the user running the PHP script.

Try the echo $output; approach mentioned above. You might see this line:

[warn] Failed to parse/validate config: Couldn't access/create private data directory "/var/www/.tor"

Also make sure the path to Tor really is /usr/bin/tor on your system and not /usr/sbin/tor