Private Tor Network on Docker

An isolated, private tor network running entirely in Docker containers

Quickstart

The easiest way to get a tor network up and running is to use the docker-compose scale function:

docker-compose scale da=3 relay=5 exit=3 client=1

Network Settings

All of the requisit information that other nodes need to know about on the network are stored in a mapped volume: ./tor:/tor. NOTE: This folder must exist on the host and allow the debian-tor user to create files in this directory.

Running Individual Roles

This is building a base tor relay container and then modifying it based on ROLE environment variable you give it. For example, this would make a directory authority (DA) docker run -e ROLE=DA antitree/tor-private-server

Available roles right now are:

• DA - directory authority
• RELAY - non-exit relay
• EXIT - exit relay
• CLIENT - exposes the tor socks port on 9050 to the host

Tor configuration

This configuration is based on the Tor documentation for how to run a private tor network. You should also check out Chutney1 which does something similar with separate processes instead of containers.

Debugging

Here are a few things to try if you're runing into issues:

• Check the tor logs sent to stdout docker logs -f torserver_da_1
• Check all the logs with docker-compose logs
• Enable verbose logging by changing the ./config/torrc
• Check permissions for your ./tor folder
• Delete the files in your ./tor folder so you can start from scratch (or specifically the torrc.da file)

References

• https://github.com/chriswayg/tor-server
• https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-relay-debian.html.en