Question

I’m trying to access a website with python through tor, but I’m having problems. I started my attempts with this thread and the one referenced in it: How to make urllib2 requests through Tor in Python?

First I tried the original code snippet:

import urllib2
proxy_handler = urllib2.ProxyHandler({"tcp":"http://127.0.0.1:9050"})
opener = urllib2.build_opener(proxy_handler)
urllib2.install_opener(opener)

then I tried the modified code posted in one of the answers, which people said worked for them. Unfortunately, the code works in that it downloads the page, but it doesn’t work because my IP address is still the same:

proxy_support = urllib2.ProxyHandler({"http" : "127.0.0.1:8118"})
opener = urllib2.build_opener(proxy_support) 
opener.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0')]
print opener.open('http://www.google.com').read()

I have TOR set up in the standard configuration, per the Ubuntu and TOR sites respective documentation, and nmap shows the TOR tcp proxy running on port 9050: 9050/tcp open tor-socks However, my IP address isn’t changed when I run either of the above scripts. Is python not respecting the http environment variables, or is there a code problem that I’m missing?

Answer 1

TOR provides a SOCKS proxy. Since urllib2 can only handle HTTP proxies, you’ll have to use a SOCKS implementation.