How to use the terminal to change the IP address provided by Tor?

Question

I have the Tor service, and I want to use the terminal to change the IP address which Tor gives me. In other words: How do I request a new IP address from Tor on the command line?

Answer 1

For tor daemon running on Ubuntu, first try this:

killall -HUP tor

If that does not work, enable the control port in your torrc file.

Then, set a password for the control port with tor --hash-password password

Open a telnet connection to the control port and issue the NEWNYM command:

printf 'AUTHENTICATE "password"\r\nSIGNAL NEWNYM\r\n' | nc 127.0.0.1 9051

sources:

• SuperUser: How do I tell tor, from the command-line, to give me a new identity in a Mac?
• Stack Overflow: How to request new TOR identity in terminal
• SuperUser: How to “flush tor circuit”

Answer 2

You can simply type or insert in your bash script:

service tor reload

Answer 3

Method 1: HUP

Mentioned at Change IP address which is given by Tor using the terminal but here go a few more details:

sudo killall -HUP tor

Then check that your IP has changed with:

curl --socks5 127.0.0.1:9050 http://checkip.amazonaws.com/

Tested in Ubuntu 17.10 with sudo apt-get install tor version 1.6.0-5.

sudo is needed since the process is started by root by default.

What an HUP signal does exactly to the Tor daemon is documented at: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/control-spec.txt?id=03aaace9bd9459b0d4bf22a75012acf39d07bcec#n394 and is equivalent to sending some command through the command port.

Browser Bundle 5.0.5 is not affected by this, only daemon ports like the default 9050, which is not used by the TBB. For that use case see: https://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/1071/how-can-a-new-circuit-happen-without-closing-all-tabs

If you are deploying an army of Tor IPs as mentioned here you can selectively send:

kill -HUP $PID

Method 2: control port

Mentioned by kat:

(echo authenticate '""'; echo signal newnym; echo quit) | nc localhost 9051

but for that to work on Ubuntu 17.10 you must first:

• enable the control port by uncommenting:

  ControlPort 9051
  

  from /etc/tor/torrc

• Set the empty password, otherwise it gives 515 Authentication failed: Wrong length on authentication cookie.. First run:

  tor --hash-password ''
  

  This outputs something like:

  16:D14CC89AD7848B8C60093105E8284A2D3AB2CF3C20D95FECA0848CFAD2
  

  Now on /etc/tor/torrc update the line:

  HashedControlPassword 16:D14CC89AD7848B8C60093105E8284A2D3AB2CF3C20D95FECA0848CFAD2
  

• Restart Tor:

  sudo service tor restart
  

Bonus: how to check that your IP changed

curl --socks5 127.0.0.1:9050 http://checkip.amazonaws.com/

See also:

• https://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/100/can-tor-be-used-with-applications-other-than-web-browsers
• Command for determining my public IP?

Related threads

• https://superuser.com/questions/449060/tor-how-to-have-different-ip-address-for-every-page-request
• Change IP address which is given by Tor using the terminal
• https://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/100/can-tor-be-used-with-applications-other-than-web-browsers
• Command for determining my public IP?

Answer 4

You can set up a control port and use the python script

from stem import Signal
from stem.control import Controller

with Controller.from_port(port = 9051) as controller:
    controller.authenticate()
    controller.signal(Signal.NEWNYM)

Answer 5

A one-liner that makes tor use a different ip address:

systemctl show -p MainPID tor | cut -d= -f2 | xargs sudo kill -HUP