How can I connect to a Tor hidden service using cURL in PHP

Question

I m trying to connect to a Tor hidden service using the following PHP code   url    http   jhiwjjlqpyawmpjx onion    ch   curl init    curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT URL   url   curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT RETURNTRANSFER  true   curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT PROXY   quot http   127 0 0 1 9050  quot    curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT PROXYTYPE  CURLPROXY SOCKS5    output   curl exec  ch    curl error   curl error  ch   curl close  ch    print r  output   print r  curl error    When I run it  I get the following error   Couldn t resolve host name  However  when I run the following command from my command line in Ubuntu  curl -v --socks5-hostname localhost 9050 http   jhiwjjlqpyawmpjx onion  I get a response as expected  The PHP cURL documentation says this  --socks5-hostname Use  the  specified  SOCKS5 proxy  and let the proxy resolve the host name    I believe the reason it works from the command line is because Tor  the proxy  is resolving the  onion hostname  which it recognizes  When running the PHP code above  my guess is that cURL or PHP is trying to resolve the  onion hostname and doesn t recognize it  I ve searched for a way to tell cURL PHP to let the proxy resolve the hostname  but I can t find a way  There is a very similar Stack Overflow question  cURL request using socks5 proxy fails when using PHP  but it works through the command line

User · Answer

Try to add this   curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT HEADER  1    curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT HTTPPROXYTUNNEL  1

User · Answer

TL DR  Set CURLOPT PROXYTYPE to use CURLPROXY SOCKS5 HOSTNAME if you have a modern PHP  the value 7 otherwise  and or correct the CURLOPT PROXY value   As you correctly deduced  you cannot resolve  onion domains via the normal DNS system  because this is a reserved top-level domain specifically for use by Tor and such domains by design have no IP addresses to map to   Using CURLPROXY SOCKS5 will direct the cURL command to send its traffic to the proxy  but will not do the same for domain name resolution  The DNS requests  which are emitted before cURL attempts to establish the actual connection with the Onion site  will still be sent to the system s normal DNS resolver  These DNS requests will surely fail  because the system s normal DNS resolver will not know what to do with a  onion address unless it  too  is specifically forwarding such queries to Tor   Instead of CURLPROXY SOCKS5  you must use CURLPROXY SOCKS5 HOSTNAME  Alternatively  you can also use CURLPROXY SOCKS4A  but SOCKS5 is much preferred  Either of these proxy types informs cURL to perform both its DNS lookups and its actual data transfer via the proxy  This is required to successfully resolve any  onion domain   There are also two additional errors in the code in the original question that have yet to be corrected by previous commenters  These are    Missing semicolon at end of line 1  The proxy address value is set to an HTTP URL  but its type is SOCKS  these are incompatible  For SOCKS proxies  the value must be an IP or domain name and port number combination without a scheme protocol prefix    Here is the correct code in full  with comments to indicate the changes    lt  php  url    http   jhiwjjlqpyawmpjx onion       Note the addition of a semicolon   ch   curl init    curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT URL   url   curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT RETURNTRANSFER  true   curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT PROXY   127 0 0 1 9050       Note the address here is just  IP port   not an HTTP URL  curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT PROXYTYPE  CURLPROXY SOCKS5 HOSTNAME      Note use of  CURLPROXY SOCKS5 HOSTNAME    output   curl exec  ch    curl error   curl error  ch   curl close  ch    print r  output   print r  curl error     You can also omit setting CURLOPT PROXYTYPE entirely by changing the CURLOPT PROXY value to include the socks5h    prefix      Note no trailing slash  as this is a SOCKS address  not an HTTP URL  curl setopt CURLOPT PROXY   socks5h   127 0 0 1 9050

User · Answer

You need to set option CURLOPT PROXYTYPE to CURLPROXY SOCKS5 HOSTNAME  which sadly wasn t defined in old PHP versions  circa pre-5 6  if you have earlier in  but you can explicitly use its value  which is equal to 7   curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT PROXYTYPE  7

User · Answer

I use Privoxy and cURL to scrape Tor pages    lt  php      ch   curl init  http   jhiwjjlqpyawmpjx onion       Tormail URL     curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT HEADER  1       curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT HTTPPROXYTUNNEL  1       curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT PROXY   localhost 8118       Default privoxy port     curl setopt  ch  CURLOPT PROXYTYPE  CURLPROXY HTTP       curl exec  ch       curl close  ch     gt    After installing Privoxy you need to add this line to the configuration file   etc privoxy config   Note the space and     a the end of line   forward-socks4a   localhost 9050     Then restart Privoxy    etc init d privoxy restart

[php] How can I connect to a Tor hidden service using cURL in PHP?

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